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Mortality Quotes
"Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then-our friends are not able to finish their stories."
14
"And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten-since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!"
14
"Aren't you afraid of dying?Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it."
14
"Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury."
14
"There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not."
13
"Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping."
13
"Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne, they rise, they break, and to that sea return."
13
"That's when it happens. The moment of death is full of heat and sound and pain bigger than anything, a funnel of burning heat splitting me in two, something searing and scorching and tearing, and if screaming were a feeling it would be this.Then nothing."
13
"We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do."
13
"I stopped in St. Bernadette's Cemetery one of my favorite places... The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid out an aisle similar to those in any library. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those whose names have been blotted from the pages of life; who have been forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here."
13
"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."
13
"Be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death."
13
"Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable."
13
"The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured."
13
"If no one knows when a person is going to die, how can we say he died prematurely?"
13
"May the merciful god, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore."
13
"Everything in the world has a life span and We (the Self) are without a life span, so how can the two correlate? To make association with those with a life span (mortal), we too have to become one with a life span. And that has created all this fiasco."
13
"Human mortality linked to the human ability consciously to choose how to act by exhibiting free will, humility, hard work, kindness, and compassion provide exemplary opportunities to learn and develop self-discipline."
13
"Death is only frightening from the near side."
12
"She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible."
12
"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."
12
"He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist."
12
"That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner."
12
"She gazed at the bay of wrecked shuttles in dismay. The last of her adrenaline seeped away at the sight of the widespread destruction.It occurred to her then, for perhaps the first time in this long nightmare, that she was going to die."
12
"IphWas a larvorium and a violet:A grave in Reason's early spring. And yetIt missed the gist of the whole thing; it missedWhat mostly interests the preterist;For we die every day; oblivion thrivesNot on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,And our best yesterdays are now foul pilesOf crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.I'm ready to become a floweretOr a fat fly, but never, to forget."
12
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