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Mortality Quotes
"As time diminishes, your life also diminishes with it."
7
"I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die."
7
"When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying."
7
"Time is your acquaintance. Life is your friend. Death is your opponent. Eternity is your companion."
7
"The moment one is born, the 'saw starts cutting'. People consider it as death only when the wood breaks in two pieces [during funeral]. But it was being cut from the very beginning."
7
"The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted."
7
"Your only real problem is mortality! No religion can solve this problem, but science can do!"
7
"Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger."
7
"Death is like that, it blinks, we blink; not always able to see the Stop signs, hiding behind trees in the corner of the roads."
7
"Instead, he would make death his final project, the center point of his days. Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great value, right? He could be research. A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me."
7
"Silver's sweet and gold's our mother, but once you're dead they're worth less than that last shit you take as you lie dying."
7
"Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were "Now comes the mystery." The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record," before dying. Alaska's favorite was playwright Eugene O'Neill: "Born in a hotel room, and--God damn it--died in a hotel room." Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, "Oh God. What's happened?" Movie star James Dean said, "They've got to see us," just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers."
7
"Death is another inevitable consequence of possessing something without its understanding."
7
"Nothing matters when you are dead, and, you are dead when nothing matters."
7
"In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest."
6
"An expensive coffin does not decrease the deceased's chances of going to hell."
6
"It is hard to have patience with people who say, 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as wel say that birth doesn't matter."
6
"Death, I've dreamed of it, I've desired it, but what real happiness can come from it?"
6
"You mortal! You time-poor! Don't waste your scarce time to be patient!"
6
"If this is death, if we are dead or dying or even if we are living and just going to die, then what do we have to fear? What are we worried about? I think the knowledge of death is freeing. That pressure we feel, the weight of life and its impending conclusion, is imaginary. And the fact that we're all in this together is unifying: there's solidarity in mortality."
6
"Whether you like it or not, your life is passing away."
6
"You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything"and I advise you to do the same."
6
"That is death - shifting from "is" to "was."
6
"A good death is a death in solidarity with others. To prepare ourselves for a good death, we must develop or deepen this sense of solidarity."
6
"The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone."
6
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