Quotes About Mortality

En fin, aunque nos aferremos a la ilusión de la juventud, la mayoría de la gente de mi edad avanza a tranco largo hacia la decrepitud y todos vamos a terminar muertos antes de que el prejuicio contra la edad sea abolido.

I'm fine here, Lenny. I'm discovering who I am without all my ornaments and accessories. It's quite a slow process, but a very useful one. Everybody ought to do the same at the end of their life. If I had any self-discipline I would beat my grandson to it and write my own memoirs. I have time, freedom, and silence, the three things I never had amidst all the noise of my earlier life. I'm preparing to die.

En la dimensión del cosmos y en el trayecto de la historia somos insignificantes, después de nuestra muerte todo sigue igual, como si jamás hubiéramos existido.

How long does a man spend dying? What does it mean to say "for ever"? Pablo Neruda

I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies.

I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it?

We tell ourselves zombie stories to remind us we shouldn't live beyond the natural boundaries of life - or seek a third stage of life in this world.

Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.

Because we've never encountered a decomposing body, we can only assume they are out to get us. It is no wonder there is a cultural fascination with zombies.

Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?

In western culture, we have ignored death. We're running the other way - everything is about life and youth. So, there's something resonant about walking around with our own death masks. Zombies are the visible embodiment of death staring at us with our own faces.

Something happened to me at the precise moment that my grandmother died. She was three time zones away, but that didn't matter. I believe that I felt something at that moment she passed... some bit of her mortality slipping away.

To achieve great things, we must live as though we were never going to die.

There is no armor against fate; death lays his icy hands on kings.

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.

Science says: "We must live," and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable; wisdom says: "We must die," and seeks how to make us die well.

A walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.

Down you mongrel, Death! Back into your kennel!

Don't look forward to the day when you stop suffering. Because when it comes, you'll know you're dead.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have moldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

It is not death that a man should fear, he should fear never beginning to live.

Death does not frighten me, but dying obscurely and above all uselessly does.

It is not death we fear, but the thought of it.