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Mortality Quotes
"The gods grant nothing more than life,So let us reject whatever lifts us To unbreathable heights, Eternal but flowerless."
38
"It will generally be found that, as soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life. But the terrors of death offer considerable resistance; they stand like a sentinel at the gate leading out of this world. Perhaps there is no man alive who would not have already put an end to his life, if this end had been of a purely negative character, a sudden stoppage of existence. There is something positive about it; it is the destruction of the body; and a man shrinks from that, because his body is the manifestation of the will to live."
38
"You are hard at work madam ," said the man near her.Yes," Answered Madam Defarge ; " I have a good deal to do."What do you make, Madam ?"Many things."For instance ---"For instance," returned Madam Defarge , composedly ,Shrouds."The man moved a little further away, as soon as he could, feeling it mightily close and oppressive ."
38
"Death would be an extremely bad thing like most of us paint it, if being dead were painful."
36
"To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten."
36
"Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It's the stress, it's the adrenalin, it's a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? she thinks. Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?"
36
"We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off."
35
"One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason."
35
"When her body first hit the net, all I registered was a gray blur. I pulled her across it and her hand was small, but warm, and then she stood before me, short and thin and plain and in all ways unremarkable- except that she had jumped first. The stiff had jumped first.Even I didn't jump first.Her eyes were so stern, so insistent.Beautiful."
35
"Peter Van Houten was the only person I'd ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it'slike to be dying, and (b) not have died."
35
"We die a little every day and by degrees we're reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars."
34
"Come, sleep and death; you promise nothing, you hold everything."
34
"No matter how careful we are, if we live long enough, eventually one of us will die. It is not a happy thought, but it is the truth. Such is the way of the world."
34
"While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born."
33
"To accept a little death is worse than death itself."
33
"And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over."
32
"In the presence of death reason and philosophy are silent."
32
"If we knew a person was going to die, we'd hold harder to the memories."
32
"We die well when we die with purpose fulfilled."
31
"Dead people are just great. Meet me when you are."
31
"This is what'll happen, she said, 'and it's true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you've seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en't just nothing now; they're part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they've gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They'll never vanish. They're just part of everything. And that's exactly what'll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again."
31
"The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream."
31
"What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull."
31
"Once a flower is picked it immediately begins to die."
31
"In reality, we are all travelers - even explorers of mortality."
30
"If you live each day as it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."
30
"LIFE - Death's Very Emissary."
30
"It is not death we fear but the thought of it."
29
"Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time."
29
"Death, he had come to believe, was a corrosive thing, and the more he was around it , the more it gnawed away at who he was."
29
"What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone."
28
"I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'."
28
"I am now faced with mortality. Definitely not the most generous move."
28
"Let me diefrom having being drunk onindigo skies, my liver...overflowing with stars."
28
"Death isn't a tragedy to God, only to those left behind."
28
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