Quotes About Mortality

Ever see a cock pheasant, stiff and beautiful, ever' feather drawed an' painted an' even his eyes drawed in pretty? An' bang! You pick him up - bloody an' twisted, an' you spoiled somepin better'n you; an' eatin' him don't ever make it up to you, 'cause you spoiled somepin in yaself, an' you can't never fix it up.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

If only I wouldn't take this book so seriously. It is just a book after all, and a book is very dead in a very short time. And I'll be dead in a very short time too. So the hell with it. Let's slow down, not in pace or wordage but in nerves.

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there's been in the world and all the fucking there's going to be, and none of it for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He'll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road.

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.

Part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.

Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths; and this is our way in. into the nether world

The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.

Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting. Such generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.

Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old.

Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do.

God save us from ever ending, though billions have./ The world is blanketed by foregone deaths,/ small beads of ego, bright with appetite,/ whose pin-sized prick of light winked out,/ bequeathing Earth a jagged coral shelf/ unseen beneath the black unheeding waves.

The eddies his breath set in motion were destroying the smoke sculptures I was erecting. The pipestem was warm on my lower lip and I thought of lip cancer. I often think about how I will die, what disease or surgical procedure will have me in its tarantula grip, what indifferent hospital wall and weary night nurse will witness my last breath, my last second, the impossibly fine point to which my life will have been sharpened.

About being mortal- I suppose it affects different people in different ways, but for me there's never been a thinning out. Being alive, no matter how sick I feel, feels absolute. You're absolutely alive and when you're not you'll be absolutely something else.

The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.

I have prepared for death all of my life by the life I lived." Socrates was at peace with himself.

I can tell you that she's not breathing," he said. "She has no heartbeat and all organ function and brain activity have stopped. Also her body temperature is now at seventy-three degrees." "So you're saying that she's dead," I said. "Well, I can't prove it, but, yes, I am leaning that way.

I don't think anybody's necessarily ready for death. You can only hope that when it approaches, you feel like you've said what you wanted to say. Nobody wants to go out in mid-sentence.

there inside the person is what will pass away and become one with what is invisible in everything...

we all come into and go out of this world as passing gatherings of structured energy.

Can we simply address what it means to be human? What is available to us in this brief moment when the universe lifts up in the form of a human sentient body and being and we live out our seventy, eighty, or ninety years (if that) and then dissolve back into the undifferentiated ocean of potential?