Quotes About Mortality

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. The artful minimalism of the speech gave it simplicity, purity, and charm.

As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep," Leonardo had written thirty years earlier, "so a well-employed life brings a happy death.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

Al igual que un día bien aprovechado trae un sueño feliz —había escrito Leonardo treinta años antes—, una vida bien empleada trae una muerte feliz.»[27] Esta le llegó el 2 de mayo de 1519, al poco de cumplir sesenta y siete años.

I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining having never been born yourself.

I sensed that almost all of them knew they didn't have much more time on earth. Maybe this accounted for their willingness to pitch in with strangers and form a neighborhood.

People are so afraid of dying that they don't even live the little bit of life they have.

mortality is a living critique of the divine

I always keep thinkin' that maybe I could find a place where you nevah have to get mad, and then I'd be cool. My daddy told me before he died that that place was called Dead .

When I was a kid," I said, "I thought that if I worried about every way I could possibly die, then none of them would happen and I'd live forever.

I ate with them and slept with them, and I killed enough blue-eyed young men to know that they were just as afraid to die as I was.

Even as my body rotted and festered under the unblinking eyes of Clark Heinemann, the thoughts I had at death survived. One thousand unpublished stories, 26,473 rejection letters, and all those editorial twits that never gave me a break. The only thing left of me was a raging emotion at every publisher of every insignificant quarterly—but most of all, Clark Heinemann.

I had forgotten that Death was watching from all sides; that it comes at you from the place you least expect.

In a few years all our restless and angry hearts will be quiet in death, but those who come after us will live in the world which our sins have blighted or which our love of right has redeemed.

In the long run, you see, none of that matters. I've seen Heaven, Dowling. And it's not a place where you exercise any power. In the long run, we are all three-dimensional side-effects of a two-dimensional universe existing in a multidimensional stack.

You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me, and feeding and clothing me and all... -- and you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can't do half the things I want to do and sometimes I just want to scream -- and what I've got to look forward to is my body breaking breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head -- I go through all this -- and then there's death ??

There are many good reasons for drinking, and one's just entered my head: If you don't drink when you're living, how the fuck can you drink when you're dead?

Don't take life seriously because you can't come out of it alive.

The last suit that you wear, you don't need any pockets.

It seems as if people begin preparing themselves for death from the time they learn there is such a thing.

As much as some people try to deny it, no one gets off this planet alive. Life, in fact, is a terminal disease.

Che differenza c'è infatti, fra trent'anni e sei mesi, rispetto all'eternità? La durata di una vita è paragonabile a un puntolino

The next time you are contemplating a decision in which you are debating whether or not to take charge of yourself, to make your own choice, ask yourself an important question, How long am I going to be dead? With that eternal perspective, you can now make your own choice and leave the worrying, the fears, the question of whether you can afford it and the guilt to those who are going to be alive forever.

How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves