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Exlpore more Mortality quotes

"Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever."

"And then his noise falls completely silent-And he stops struggling-And looking right into my eyes-He dies.My Todd dies."

"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;This sensible warm motion to becomeA kneaded clod; and the delighted spiritTo bathe in fiery floods, or to resideIn thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,And blown with restless violence round aboutThe pendent world; or to be worse than worstOf those that lawless and incertain thoughtImagine howling: 'tis too horrible!The weariest and most loathed worldly lifeThat age, ache, penury and imprisonmentCan lay on nature is a paradiseTo what we fear of death."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt


"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."


"To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone."


"Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist."


"We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people " the ancients no less than us " have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self."


"When we are sad-at least I am like this-it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change."


"And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy."


"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."


"What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?"


"For humans-trapped in biology-there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage."
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