Quotes About Mortality

Even death was something Nora couldn't do properly. It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying.

Aunt Carlotta is a lonely woman. She's a lot older than me. She's really an old lady now. She's forty-two. Hardly anyone lives to be forty-two.

Even death was something Nora couldn't do properly, it seemed. It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying.

They die, and so they have impatience.

Car accident, drug overdose, drowning, a bout of fatal food poisoning, choking on an apple, choking on a cookie, choking on a vegan hot dog, choking on a non-vegan hot dog, every illness it was possible for you to catch or contract . . . You have died in every way you can, at any time you could.

There was death. Violent, oblivious death, in bear form, staring at her with its black eyes. And she knew then, more than she'd known anything, that she wasn't ready to die.

You don't go to death. Death comes to you.

And I felt an incredible excitement at being able to witness the love reemerge inside her, because it was a total, prime-of-life love. The kind that could only be possible in someone who was going to die at some point in the future, and also someone who had lived enough to know that loving and being loved back was a hard thing to get right, but when you managed it, you could see forever.

It seems impossible to live without hurting people.' 'That's because it is.' 'So why live at all?' 'Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too.

I realized that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered

Bertrand Russell wrote that 'To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead'. Maybe that

All of our earthly concerns are quite transient compared to the sky.

they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married or they don't get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realize they would have done it the same, and then they die.

While the Midnight Library stands, Nora, you will be preserved from death. Now, you have to decide how you want to live.

And death only happens to people who have been living. There were infinitely more people who had never been alive. I wanted to be one of those people.

and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to . . . —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

That was the depressing thing about knowing other albas. You realised that we weren't special. We weren't superheroes. We were just old. And that, in cases such as Hendrich, it didn't really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

no medicinal fix we contrive will lead us to live forever. "There is no ultimate solution. There is no free lunch. If you cure cancer, you will have more cases of neurodegenerative disease. If you cure neurodegenerative disease, a major plague will come for people who are a hundred years old. There is no ultimate solution, nor should there be.

And you never know when a meal will be your last . . . None of us do.

I bought a generic cat. It only had five lives.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.

When Byron's eyes were shut in death, We bow'd our head and held our breath. He taught us little: but our soul Had felt him like the thunder's roll.

What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth?-- Most men eddy about Here and there--eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and, then they die-- Perish; and no one asks Who or what they have been, More than he asks what waves In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd, Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

Yes: in the sea of life enisl'd, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.