Quotes About Mortality

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust [369] that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to go as he came.

Norman Cousins said, "Death is not the enemy, living in constant fear of it is.

Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is. If there is such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my own life, it lies in the acceptance of the human condition and perhaps the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word of caution from the shadows, sometimes visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows.

At that moment I realized the error of my thinking about Bootsie. The problem wasn't in her disease, it was in mine. I wanted a lock on the future; I wanted our marriage to be above the governance of mortality and chance; and, most important, in my nightly sleeplessness over her health, and the black fatigue that I would drag behind me into the day like a rattling junkyard, I hadn't bothered to be grateful for the things I had.

was learning that when you get close to death, you'll trade everything you own for one more day on earth.

Life's a sonofabitch, then you die.

Here's the strange thing about death. At a certain age it's always with you, lurking in the shade, pulling at your ankles, whispering in your ear when you pass a crypt. But it doesn't get your real attention until you find yourself alone at home and the wind swells inside the rooms and stresses the joists and lets you know what silence and solitude are all about.

The sky was purple, streaked with fire, the palm trees like scorched tin cutouts against the sun. I woke at four in the morning and could not sleep again, my heart congealed with a sense of mortality that I could not explain.

Edwin Arlington Robinson once wrote that God slays Himself with every leaf that flies. I think the same is true of us. I think we cannot understand ourselves until we understand that living is a form of dying. My generation was born during the Great Depression and, for good or bad, will probably be the last generation to remember traditional America. Our deaths may be inconsequential; the fling we had was not.

Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is.

We're wayfaring strangers. We're born alone, we die alone.

How did a man know when it was his time? The answer is simple. There comes a moment when you no longer resist the inevitable and you accept the fact that billions have preceded you and that your death is not more important than theirs.

How did a man know when it was his time? The answer was simple. There comes a moment when you no longer resist the inevitable and you accept the fact that billions have preceded you and that your death is not more important than theirs.

I no longer care that my time on earth is coming to an end. What better way than in hot blood? Would you rather meet the grim reaper at Roncevaux or between bedsheets stiff with your own fluids?

It's fair to say that mortality takes many manifestations, but so does the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and it does so in ways that are sometimes hardly noticeable.

Molly Boyle and I made love in the bedroom, in the slow and unhurried fashion of people who are secure in the knowledge the two of them, together, have legitimate claim on the next day, and that mortality and the demands of the world are no longer of great importance. What better moment could human beings create for themselves? Let the world, at least for tonight, find its own answers for a change, I told myself.

As William Shakespeare said in Henry IV, "we owe God a death and let it go which way it will he that dies this year is quit for the next.

As I say, they don't teach it at the academy, but you learn it on the job: not every man's death is a crime.

but all your 'sorrys' are gone when a person dies... That's why you have to say all your 'sorrys' and 'I love yous' while a person is living, because tomorrow isn't promised.

Life is just a dream on the way to death.

It's not death if you refuse it... It is if you accept it.

Childhood is over when you know you're gonna die.

Death, like virtue, has its degrees.

Boy, you just can't kill people like you used to