Quotes About Mortality

It's ironic that when I was alive, all I thought about was death.

Yalom wrote in Existential Psychotherapy, our awareness of death helps us live more fully—and with less, not more, anxiety.

She could stand to think that life's experiences, good and bad, died with the body, but she couldn't bear to believe that the dreams vanished too, those exquisite flights of reverie that never actually happened. All those experiences you can have for free. How could they burn and turn to ash? She would disappear one day, too, both her flesh and the woman she dreamed herself to be.

None of us knows how long any one of us has left. It could be fifty hours, could be fifty years. We're just glad we're here today. And we won't forget those who aren't.

If a nuclear disaster occurred, and you had to live out those final painful days just stretched out somewhere thinking about your life--This is who I am. This is what I love. This is what I believe--who would you want hearing your whispers? Or perhaps better: Who do you trust to hear your whispers? Whose breath do you want mingled with your own? Whose flesh still warm beside you?

You only live once, right? Not true, Quinn said, you live every day. You only die once.

Death is hereditary. Make sure you enjoy each day before it catches you.

Don't take life too seriously. After all, none of us are getting out alive anyway." PHOEBE TRAEGER

I promise to pay you before you die - but you have to promise not to die.

Life can be confusing. Good God, and how. Sometimes it seems like the older I get, the more confused I become. That seems ass-backwards. I thought I was supposed to be getting wiser. Instead, I just keep getting hit over the head with my relative insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe. Confusing, life. But it beats the hell out of the alternative.

All things pass in time. We are far less significant than we imagine ourselves to be. All that we are, all that we have wrought, is but a shadow, no matter how durable it may seem. One day, when the last man has breathed his last breath, the sun will shine, the mountains will stand, the rain will fall, the streams will whisper—and they will not miss him.

I mean, we're all going to die. We know that on an intellectual level. We figure it out when we're still fairly young, and it scares us so badly that we convince ourselves we're immortal for more than a decade afterwards.

Got to die of something, Giraldi observed. Might as well put back a few pints while you wait to see what it is.

Everyone dies, honey, I said, very quietly. Everyone. There's no 'if.' There's only 'when.' I let that sink in for a moment. When you die, do you want to feel ashamed of what you've done with your life? Feel ashamed of what your life meant?

Life is full of toil, sacrifice, and pain, and from the time we stop growing, we know that we've begun dying. We watch helplessly as year by year, our bodies age and fail, while our survival instincts compel us to keep on going-which means living with the terrifying knowledge that ultimately death is inescapable.

The only people who never hurt are dead.

Empty night, Harry. Didn't your little adventure in the lake teach you a damned thing? I scowled some more. Like what? Like life is short, he [Thomas] said. Like you don't know when it's going to end. Like some things, left unsaid, can't ever be said.

I don't know the good or the evil of the thing. That's something that only you mortals worry about.

Death is only frightening from the near side.

I witnessed the birth of time itself. I watched the mortal coil spring forth from perfect darkness. I watched the stars form, watched this world coalesce, watched as life was breathed into it and as your kind rose to rule it. She put both hands on the table and leaned toward me, her blue eyes cold and hard. Thus far, I have behaved as a guest ought. But do not mistake propriety for weakness, mortal. I beg you not to oblige me to take further action.

Graves aren't for the dead. They're for the loved ones the dead leave behind them. Once those loved ones have gone, once all the lives that have touched the occupant of any given grave had ended, then the grave's purpose was fulfilled and ended.

Time, time," Toot complained. "Is that all you mortals can ever think about? Everyone's complaining about time! The whole city rushes left and right screaming about being late and honking horns! You people used to have it right, you know.

Death should be a learning experience, after all, or what's the point?

That's the difficult part of being mortal. Of having choice. Much is hidden from you.