Quotes About Mortality

How could you ever bring yourself to love so deeply if you truly knew how brief a lifetime can be?

There's always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.

There's worse ways to be dead than dying.

Worse than alcoholism or heroin addiction, dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you're lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw. It's as if you've shirked life—simply not made enough serious effort to live up to your full potential.

You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap.

Way she sees it, people fall into one of two categories: those who think their death is imminent, and those who figure they have long, healthy lives ahead of them. Nobody ever thinks it's somewhere in-between.

Death was a tragedy. But death was also a data point.

Because we all end up in the dirt at the end.

It's all elbows, Paul. Death and elbows.

The brief arc of our days, O Sestius, prevents us from launching prolonged hopes.

Wat kan in de bezigheden der mensen van belang lijken voor een man die de eeuwigheid voor ogen houdt en zich bewust is van de uitgestrektheid van het universum?

A book is a suicide postponed.

Even from just a little thing, it's still possible to die.

I'm sick of seeing people die!

I escape into sleep. Sleep is what I'll miss most when I die.

in the days when the world begins to bleach and shrivel, and the sun is blotched with death. Socialist and Individualist, they'll all be a little dirt lodged deep in the granite wrinkles of the globe's countenance.

We see on our death bed, not our whole life flashing before us – as with a drowning man – but an endless sequence of all the things we had wanted to do and had never done.

We each die countless little deaths on our way to the last. We die out of shame as humiliation. We perish from despair. And, of course, we die for love.

We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.

I think babies cry when they're born because they're born with the knowledge of all the terrible shit that's gonna happen to them. That's why I never had kids. Every life is a death sentence. We just forget it later in life, like dreams we lose the second we wake up. Whether we worry about it or not, the shit's still going to fly. The important thing is we're here. At least for now.

We're living; but we impersonate the dead better than the dead themselves.

Life was not a reversible commodity. Things passed away, never to return: species, hopes, years.

Was that the point about scattering ashes: that in the end they looked the same? Not just the snout and the tail, but a dog's ashes and a man's ashes. All reducible, with the addition of a little flame, to this mottled dust?

We're all in it together, Harry. We're all pieces of the fisherman. I know that sounds like a bullshit answer, but you'll see, when you start to work with the dead. Everyone's complicit: the most innocent little kiddies; babies who live a day, an hour—they still have a hand in things, even their own deaths. I know that's very hard for you to get your head around right now, but take it from someone that's spent a lot of time with death.