Quotes About Mortality

But when I look out at it I think, well, it's going to take us all one of these days, whoever we are: mad bastards, lovers, drunkards, it's not going to pick and choose. We'll all go to nothing sooner or later. And you know, maybe it's my age, but that doesn't worry me any longer. We all have our time, and when it's over, it's over.

Some die too soon. Most live too long.

Everybody is a book of blood; Wherever we're opened, we're red. The Book of Blood The dead have highways.

Dead isn't bad," Narcisse said. "It isn't even that different.

Jedno od vas ?e jednog dana umrijeti, a osim u slu?aju avionske nesre?e ili ne?eg sli?nog, jedno ?e umrijeti prije drugog. Takav je život, Smoky. Živimo, a zatim umiremo, a jedino u što nismo sigurni je koliko ?e vremena izme?u toga pro?i.

The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die rather than change its nature.

Americans in 1763 lived always in the shadow and presence of death. Death was not yet romanticized as it would be in the 19th century, nor yet sanitized as it would be in the 20th century.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.

At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.

Everything in the garden is dying, that's what time of year it is. The leaves blaze and desiccate in their dying before twisting to the ground as ash.

Two other women took their own lives that spring, more than usual but nothing remarkable. No one with a name that would be remembered come winter, so shallow was their mark.

He was aware of his body as a shell. Fragile, thin as excuses. A vessel containing the dust of his essential him-ness which would be lost when the vessel failed. Well, that was the way of the world. For a time he was fixed in his body, stuck and named and fixed in place, but one day that would not be the case. One day only his name would remain, on a tombstone or etched onto an urn, marking his dried bones or ashes.

Now he thought about the poor man and his last view of earth: the groove of rust worn from the tub's leaky faucet, like the ooze from a wound.

When you divide death by life you find a circle.

Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.

She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.

If your life doesn't flash in front of your eyes, old boy, does that mean you've had no life at all?

One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.

only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself.

When I walk the halls of my high school those smudges are a constant reminder that death is a mere squint away.

Quand on voir ce qu'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on lassie/ Seul le silence est grand tout le reste est faiblesse.

If we were immortal, we could legitimately postpone every action forever. [...] But in the face of death as absolute finis to our future and boundary to our possibilities, we are under the imperative of utilizing our lifetimes to the utmost, not letting the singular opportunities - whose finite sum constitutes the whole of life - pass by unused.

sub specie aeternitatis.

One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died.