Quotes About Mortality

life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

She does, certain; the best of young folks is, they remind us of the old ones. 'Tis nateral to cling to life, folks say, but for me, I git impatient at times. Most everybody's gone now, an' I want to be goin'. 'Tis somethin' before me, an' I want to have it over with. I want to be there 'long o' the rest o' the folks. I expect to last quite awhile, though; I may see ye couple o' times more, John.

the rhetorical formulas of objurgation with which I was to begin a page of inquiries of you: whether you were dead

These windings up of unfinished years continue till the unfinished life winds up.

History . . ." Jacobs spoke with terse authority. Brought Ori to a hush. "Is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible.

Stated most simply, New Death is the condition whereby human corpses now lie always on a horizontal vector—no matter the angle of the surface or the substance of the matter below them—and now orient so that their feet are facing all observers, all the time.

Can living artwork die? Can it live before it dies?

There are two perfect men one dead, and the other unborn.

There are two perfectly good men, one dead, and the other unborn

What sort of people are they, to act thus?' Yedigei asked aloud; he was deeply upset. 'Everything on earth is important to them, except death.' Yet this thought gave him no peace. 'If death is nothing to them, then it follows that life also has no value for them. What is their purpose in life? For what and how do they live?

What is the most wondrous thing on earth? Each day countless humans enter the Temple of Death, yet the ones left behind continue to live as though they were immortal.

No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.

Life is the ultimate adventure, and Death, the prize that awaits us all.

In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.

He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didn't care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.

The idea that Sophie could die had always been there, ever since the first diagnosis, and yet it seemed like a bad place on a map, an Ivory Coast, somewhere not urgently frightening because fear itself kept you away from the place. You thought of it as somewhere braver people went, or at least as somewhere you'd have plenty of time to pack your bags for.

Well, let me make something perfectly clear (as Richard Nixon says on those old news clips about the Watergate scandal, right before he's about to fill the room with fog)I am not immortal. I've spent more than ten hours in the psych ward with Sarah Byrnes--really and truly the toughest person in our solar system--and I'll tell you what, if life can shoot Sarah Byrnes ot of the sky, it can nail me blindfolded.

He knew that we take what the universe gives us, and we either get the most out of it or we don't, but in the end we all go out the same way.

I think when you're dying you start looking for important things in the corners. You can't let anything that seems even semi-important pass, because it passes forever. Things take on meaning.

Lincoln confessed that leaving Springfield was affecting him more deeply than anyone could imagine, a sadness felt more acutely because of a stubborn premonition that he would never return alive.

Everyone wants to believe in something that will make their mundane lives more bearable and their inevitable death less … final.

Why is it, he thinks, that women find gray hair attractive? Perhaps it reminds them of death, and they find that exciting. Maybe they find it appealing to consider the perishability of their men.

Last week at school Pam Struger wondered why the brilliant girls all die.

he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death.