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Mortality Quotes
"When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection."
36
"Death isn't a tragedy to God, only to those left behind."
36
"Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time."
35
"I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'."
35
"I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready."
34
"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."
33
"To be able to die consciously, we need to prepare for death while we are still living."
33
"Let me diefrom having being drunk onindigo skies, my liver...overflowing with stars."
33
"It seems like with you everything leads back to the subject of death.""Sure and show me the person's road that does not lead to death. we try to divert our attention, to pretend 'tisn't so, but the very air we breathe is vulture's breath. Please don't be insinuatin' your man is morbid. I dwell on death in order to defeat it."
33
"The hardest thing about 'everything happens for a reason' is waiting for that reason to show up."
32
"How quickly the dead faded into each other."
30
"Leave the dead to the Earth. They are not for us."
30
"For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die."
28
"Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism."
27
"Not that there seems to be any appropriate place to bury someone, but these municipal cemeteries, or any cemetery at all for that matter, like the ones by the highway, or the ones in the middle of town, with all these bodies with their corresponding rocks - oh it's just too primitive and vulgar, isn't it? The hole, and the box, and the rock on the grass? And we glamorize this process, feel it fitting and dramatic, austerely beautiful, standing there by the hole as we lower the box. It's incredible. Barbaric and base."
26
"Life is a constant process of dying."
26
"Every morning I read the obituaries. If it ain't there I make myself a cup of tea and carry on like I have the past century or so."
26
"You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?"
26
"The best part of my life is ,My death will not cause pain for anyone."
26
"I was desperate not to confront the fact that this really could be it-that "nineteen" didn't matter, that there really was a point at which even young bodies fail. I was not immortal."
24
"They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me."
24
"To die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one's departure from this world."
24
"If she was going to die, Marla didn't want to know about it."
24
"I wonder about death, I who may never know it. It looks much like ecstacy, the way they open their mouths as they drown, the way their fingers dig into your skin. Their eyes are wide and startled and they trash in your hands as though with an excess of passion."
23
"Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls - which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self?"
23
"The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD. The caseworker told me this a few years ago when the suicides started back up again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled."
23
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