Quotes About Mortality

We tend to talk about death as if it is losing a battle, but that assumes living is winning and dying is not.

People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death.

My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.

It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificient activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.

This forms the nub of a dilemna that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.

I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink (…) That was a very different thing from wanting to die.

This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.

in October 1993, Gary Ball died of cerebral edema—swelling of the brain brought on by high altitude—during an attempt on 26,795-foot Dhaulagiri, the world's sixth-tallest mountain. Ball drew his last, labored breaths in Hall's arms, lying comatose in a small tent high on the peak. The next day Hall buried his friend in a crevasse.

Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.

Mortality had remained a conveniently hypothetical concept, an idea to ponder in the abstract. Sooner of later the divestiture of such a privileged innocence was inevitable, but when it finally happened the shock was magnified by the sheer superfluity of the carnage.

We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

But there's another story, A real short one, probably written on my grave: couldn't stay sober. Never liked himself.

What did she die of? The same thing that gets everybody in the end: a combination of circumstances

The gods would be moving on, in other words; and I, a mere mortal, would be left behind, forgotten

A disease, Terry - the most widespread and life-curtailing disease of all! Forget cancer, forget multiple sclerosis, forget AIDS. If you spend eight hours a day in bed, then sleep is shortening your life by a third! That's the equivalent of dying at the age of fifty - and it's happening to all of us. This is more than just a disease: this is a plague! And none of us is immune, you realize.

Resolved, that I will live so, as I shall wish I had done when I come to die.

Our culture is an edifice built of external memories, a way of fending off mortality.

Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!

The fundamental fact about all of us is that we're alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty well licked.

I said it was OK, I said I loved her, I said not to worry about me. Her breathing became slower and more labored, and then just past noon, it stopped altogether. I laid my cheek on her chest and held her for a long time, not thinking anything, just being an animal that had lost its mother.

The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die.

Time stops for the duration of a cigarette: when you're smoking, you're acutely present to yourself; you step outside the unconscious rush of life. This is why the condemned are allowed a final cigarette...it's a lot easier to leave the world if you're certain that you have really been in it.