Quotes About Mortality

Bodies are just leftovers, not the real event on death.

Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.

He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother's arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water. Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life. Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.

Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn't even a shape left in the world where you'd been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.

it had probably been a long enough life. Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to someone else. What an odd thing existence was.

the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

They had triumphed over death this night. Sylvie wondered when death would seek his revenge.

The only time you were safe was when you were dead.

Personally, I don't think it right to make up things about real people—although I suppose there's an argument for saying that once you're dead you're not real any more. But then we have to define what we mean by real and none of us wants to go down that tortuous path because we all know where it leads (madness or a first-class honours, or both).

Juliet sighed and wondered if one day she would think herself to death. Was that possible? And would it be painful?

Why did people understand how precious each day was only once the doors to the grave had opened and they had looked inside? What was the point of that?

I don't actually live here, Reggie said. Who does live here then? Ms. MacDonald, except that she doesn't because she's dead. Everyone's dead. I'm not, Jackson said. You're not.

He was at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they're going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it, but that doesn't stop them from trying, whether it's shagging anything that moves or listening to early Bruce Springsteen and buying a top-of-the-range motorbike (a BMW K 1200 LT usually, thus considerably upping their chances of meeting death even earlier than anticipated).

The thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a virtuous man.

No man at all can be living forever and we must be satisfied.

At fifty you realize that you are no longer a kid. I ignored forty. It was like I was almost at middle age. Maybe it's the baby boomer thing. But undeniably, I am a man. I have to accept [mortality].

Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man.

Death alone discloses how insignificant are the puny bodies of men.

Only death reveals what a nothing the body of man is.

But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives 10,000 years and a man can't die soon enough.

We're young men; we're not ready to die.

Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it; it unlooses the chain of the captive, and puts the bondsman's task into another man's hand.

For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.