Quotes About Mortality

Thy decay's still impregnate with divinity.

[On middle age:] ... the very real possibility for you of growing fat as you near death and thus being seen by everyone while you are both DEAD AND FAT.

Does anyone act more like an overserious senior citizen with time running out on their chance for immortality than someone in their twenties?

Old Age- You can tell when you're getting old when you stop taking drugs for fun and start taking them to keep you alive.-character Jackson Rockenberger (Broken)

Sometimes I feel that I'm not just aging . . . I'm decomposing.

It's a sobering thought: When Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.

We enter the world alone, we leave it alone.

When the sparrow sings its final refrain, the hush is felt nowhere more deeply than in the heart of man.

Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the tremendous household of millions and millions.

There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.

Be guided by feeling alone. We are only simple mortals, subject to error...

Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, 'Thy will be done,' and then again I am free and can go to sleep.

Well, honey, everybody has to die sometime.

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead.

It seemed to us that we'd never thought of him before as a man who would die. He never had thought of himself in that way. Until that year, although he'd cursed his weakness and his age, he'd either ignored the idea of his death or had refused to believe in it. He'd only thought of himself as living.

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.

Having paid for life, we receive death. By now, in this nineteen hundred and eighty-sixth Year of Our Lord, we all have purchased how many shares in death? How many bombs, shells, mines, guns, grenades, poisons, anonymous murders, nameless sufferings, official secrets? But not the controlling share. Death cannot be marketed in controlling shares.

My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it. All I seem to have done is avoid wherever I could (so far) the man across the desk—for (so far) the world has afforded a little room for a few of us, lucky or blessed, to go around him. And now I wonder if I can die quickly enough and secretly enough to make the final evasion.

It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress--it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!

Amos Vogel was a mentor, a guiding light for me. In his presence, you always rose. But his importance to me is of minor significance. What is significant is that with him an entire epoch ends. The Last Lion has left us. I am still not capable – or rather unwilling – to understand the fact that Amos passed away, because a man like him cannot be dead. His traces are everywhere. (on the passing of Amos Vogel, his friend for more than 45 years)

But in the end, he's just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.

There's really no point in doing anything in life because it's all over in the blink of an eye. The next thing you know, rigor mortis sets in.

Anne says that fear of death is the basis of all violence