Quotes About Mortality

People don't usually bother me very much, since they are, after all, only flesh and blood, and I know very well just how fragile and transitory that is. But

Being dead doesn't hurt at all. It's being alive that hurts. And it's a lot more dangerous than being dead, too.

Would he paddle away any faster if he knew that there was no iron-barred room, no handcuffs, and no arrest churning happily along in his wake? That the only justice for him will be the final kind, from the High Court of Pain, and his rights are limited to only one: He has the right to shuffle off his mortal coil and spin away into the Dark Forever, and there is no appeal, no parole, and no way out at all.

I will never get the hours back in my life that I spent covering the Federals, said David Remnick, the team's Washington Post beat writer. I'll be on my deathbed thinking about that.

An old man learns that time is short. If I do not speak my mind while I am able Ã¢â'¬Â¦ well, death provides ample time for silence. It

The pain, you know. It's one hell of a way to die.

When innocent people find themselves in situations that require the presence and protection of people like me, their reaction more often than not is as much bewilderment as fear. Mortality is tough to process. But

He didn't want to die on Monday. It seemed common.

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

This, Tolstoy says, is our human predicament: we're the man clutching the branch. Death awaits us. There is no escape. And so we distract ourselves by licking whatever drops of honey come within our reach.

His lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had.

I mean, in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we're born.

And all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / and to die is different from that anyone supposed, and luckier.

Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years.

Though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more.

I hadn't gotten old enough to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead.

And so we lie on our backs, probing, recoiling, probing again, and the seeds of death get lost in the mess God made us. It's no different with the girls. Hardly have we begun to palpate their grief than we find ourselves wondering whether this particular wound was mortal or not, or whether (in our blind doctoring) it's a wound at all.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead.

what really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death

A few years ago, I read an article saying that the mortality rate for comedians is higher than those serving in the military. How heartbreaking is that? When we think of comedy, we think funny, light, and uplifting, never considering those for whom the burden was too much, like Robin Williams, Richard Jeni, Drake Sather, or Charles Rocket.

Of course the fall semester didn't start for another eight weeks or so. There was always a chance we were both being overly optimistic in thinking I'd be alive when it rolled around.

There is no lock strong enough nor wall thick enough to keep Death out, he murmured, his lips close to my ear so that I could feel the puff of his breath against my skin. The ends of a couple of his braids had found their way under the collar of my flannel night-shirt and tickled the base of my neck. Are you speaking literally or metaphorically?