Quotes About Mortality

Usually the walk home from the Swan was a time for regret—regret that his joints ached so badly, that he had drunk too much, that the best of life had passed him by and he had only aches and pains ahead of him now, a gradual decline till at the end he would sink into the grave.

but death so rapidly undoes a person, and the detail of her face was hard to recall in any ordinary way.

You can't live when you're afraid of daying.

The thought of [our] destruction is like a light in the middle of the night that spreads its flames on the objects it will soon consume. We must get used to contemplating this light, since it announces nothing that has not been prepared by all that comes before; and since death is as natural as life, why should be so afraid of it?

So traumatic is the idea of jumping out of a window [of a burning building] that it is easier to pretend the fire will never reach us. It is the same with death: we know it is approaching, but we act as if it is never going to come. The vast majority of us, especially here in the west, construct our lives based on the denial of death.

Thinking of death--strange, beautiful, terrible and a long way off--made me feel happier than ever.

People's clothes ought to be buried with them.

Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing

Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.

Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology.

I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?

The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die?

What's the point of living if we don't die at the end of it?

Isn't death a blessing? Doesn't it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?

Nothingness is staring you in the face. Utter and permanent oblivion. You will cease to be. To be, Jack. The dier accepts this and dies. The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life. - Murray (WN 291)

I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be only human, subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

People get bitten. But I won't.' I found myself saying, 'You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite you and you will die.

Like I'm a person and you're a person, which gives you the right to kill me.