Quotes About Mortality

In my loving dying heart a twilight is coming, a last ray, gently reproaching. from Stone: 24 By Osip Mandelstam Translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin

Every thing-become is mortal. Not only peoples, languages, races and Culture are transient.

Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in the rose-coloured optimism of Progress (which no one actually believes in), he masks it with literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But

There is but one end to all the conflict, and that is death—the death of individuals, of peoples, of cultures. Our own death still lies far ahead of us in the murky darkness of the next thousand years.

There is no substituting anything else for Life. After Life there is only Death.

Sure, it's going to kill a lot of people, but they may be dying of something else anyway.

Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death.

Days, when you could not stroll on the beach, without finding at your feet a corpse, hastily thrust into the loosened sand, for dogs to gnaw and vultures to make their meal, or look across the harbour without seeing some dead body floating, upright and horrible, in the face of the summer sun.

Who upholds that the good is oft interred with our bones. 'Tisn't true though it is Shakspeare who says it; if you leave your family or your pet hospital a good many thousands, you will get the cardinal virtues, and a trifle more, in letters of gold on your tomb; though if you have lived up to your income, or forgotten to insure, any penny-alining La Monnoye will do to scribble your epitaph, and break off with "C'est trop mentir pour cinq écus!

Where grave philosophers have watched the setting sun die out of the sky, as the glories of their own youth have died away unvalued, till lost for ever. Where ascetic reading-men have mooned along its banks blind to all the loveliness of the water-lily below, or the clouds above, as they took their constitutional and pondered their prize essay.

I wonder now that I did not die; but if everything died that is full of wretchedness, your world would soon have but a sparse peopling.

Envy feeds on the living. It ceases when they are dead.

Your lot is mortal: not mortal is what you desire.

And death is a thing much cleaner than vice.

I remember coming to in white room, with white walls, and people all around me covered in white sheets and thinking, F**k, I'm in the morgue. Then I heard a hissing noise next to my bed. Pssst, pssst. I looked down and there was this kid holding up a pen and a copy of "Bark at the Moon" . 'Will you sign this for me?' he asked. 'F**k off,' I told him. 'I'm dead.'

One thing I've learned about myself over the years is that I'm no good at dealing with people dying. It's not that I'm afraid of it – I know that everyone's gotta go eventually – but I can't help thinking that there are only one or two ways of being brought into this world, but there are so many f**ked-up ways of leaving it.

He [dad] always had some kind of trouble with his leg. He'd have bandages wrapped around it all the time but he'd never go and see a doctor. He'd rather have dropped dead than go to a doctor. He was terrified of them, like a lot of people his age were. And he'd never take a day off work. If he ever stayed at home feeling ill, it was time to call the undertaker.

I've come to believe that everything in life is worked out in advance. So whenever bad shit happens, there ain't nothing you can do about it. You've just gotta ride it out. And eventually death will come, like it comes to everyone.

Someone's gonna die before this is over,' I said to Doc McGhee. [...] 'I don't think someone's gonna die, Ozzy. I think we're all gonna die.'

Idézet, "én", idézet vége, foglalta össze Esti Kornél a modern utáni irodalmi törekvéseket és azok nyomorúságát és szükségszer?ségét, majd meghalt, de nem bírt.

Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble.

Always read the stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.

Writing lives forever, while you may not.