Quotes About Mortality

In fact living is dying.

It's the simple truth that mortal men cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower, while others live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amidst the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sheer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the life lines and fate lines of men.

He could guess, analyze, play out scenarios in his mind, but he would never know. It was a night-time truth that became a queer, private sorrow for him amid all that came after. A symbol, a displacement of regret. A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once, until Morian called the soul away and Eanna's lights were lost. We can never truly know the path we have not walked.

What mortal knew the way their fate line would run?

If this was the world as the god-or gods-had made it, then mortal man, this mortal man, could acknowledge that and honour the power and infinite majesty that lay within it, but he would not say it was right, or bow down as if he were only dust or a brittle leaf blown from and autumn tree, helpless in the wind.

We like to believe, or pretend, we know what we are doing in our lives. It can be a lie. Winds blow, waves carry us, rain drenches a man caught in the open at night, lightning shatters the sky and sometimes his heart, thunder crashes into him bringing the awareness he will die.

But what did one own if life, if love, could be taken away to darkness? Was it all not just ... a loan, a leasehold, transitory as candles?

You can indeed die at the margins of a story, but you are as dead as if it were your own tale ending and never told.

What shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

You do not have to die this certain day. Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment. You need not die today. Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness. Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow. Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

Not that anybody is saying that these people have no trouble. Merely that it is trouble with a gold-flecked beautiful banner. Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease to be. And Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours. It is just that so often they live till their hair is white. They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers. . . .

We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

Even in terms of fiction, nothing in their lives became them like the leaving of it. King Fjolnir rose in the night to make water, fell into a vat of mead and drowned instead; Sveigdir ran after a dwarf when drunk and vanished into a boulder; Vanlandi was trampled to death by a nightmare; Domaldi was sacrificed for good seasons; Dag was struck on the head with a pitchfork when seeking revenge for his sparrow; and so on down to the fifth century.

El?ttem van az apám – mondta. – Elmélyülten, élvezettel tudta lemetélni a körmeit a lábáról, aztán mégis meghalt. – Ez hogy jön ide? – kérdezte Aszperger idegesen. – Nem tudom – felelte Fiszer. – De nem tébolyító? Az embernek csak n?, csak n? a körme, és nem tehet róla!

Hiába rohadsz meg az élet nevében. Aki egyszer már megrohadt, az nem az egészséget, hanem a rohadást konzerválja magában.

Egy halálosan beteg társadalom húsz körömmel kapaszkodik a tulajdon halálos betegségébe. Ha meggyógyítja, beledöglik.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, zynders to zynders: even those who protest that they never go to funerals have to in the end.

He looked closely into Vyvyan's round and smiling face and said solemnly, "Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

Only the insomniac looks on with open eyes, like a cadaver who forgot to die.

Power belongs to the smallest and to the dead.

Behold the portrait of our mortality

I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.

When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.