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Mortality Quotes


"There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?"


"The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled."


"Next she turned the gun upward and thrust the muzzle into her mouth. Now it was aimed directly at her cerebrum-- the gray labyrinth where consciousness resided."


"If she was going to die, Marla didn't want to know about it."


"Ashes have no fear to burn in hellIn your heart's paradise angels dwellRib cage fastens all sins of the wrongYour bones will sing you mortality's song."


"Certain aspects of dying are still a mystery to me now, but as I grow and study life more, the end of my life becomes more of a certain truth."


"I've never once thought about how I was going to die, she said. "I can't think about it. I don't even know how I'm going to live."



"How quickly the dead faded into each other."


"Death is more meaningful than just being dead."


"If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time."


"Sleeping is terrifying.When you close your eyes and surrender your consciousness to the void, you lose yourself-voluntarily-and you're trustingly assuming you'll find yourself back out of the labyrinth again.Usually you do.But sometimes you don't.It's that uncertainty, more than anything, which kills me. That I might not wake up, and wouldn't know it.That I could be dead, dreaming I'm alive."


"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."



"There are worse ways to die than warm and drunk."


"That is death - shifting from "is" to "was."


"If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of."


"Death would not surprise us as often as it does, if we let go of the misbelief that newborns are less mortal than the elderly."


"The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life."


"He dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips, her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins."



"One simply goes around doing egoism and then ultimately he ends up on the wood of the funeral pyre; such is the pitiful state. And if one is a very good person, he will be cremated with sandalwood. But it is all wood in the end. The true victor is the one who never dies."


"You don't need a sad soul to feel the beauty of a dead graveJust stay with the pale moonwhen darkness wants the night to be brave."


"Still, being fragile creatures, humans always try to hide from themselves the certainty that they will die. They do not see that it is death itself that motivates them to do the best things in their lives. They are afraid to step into the dark, afraid of the unknown, and their only way of conquering that fear is to ignore the fact that their days are numbered. They do not see that with an awareness of death, they would be able to be even more daring, to go much further in their daily conquests, because then they would have nothing to lose- for death itself is inevitable."


"They say, the sun brings life to the world. The sun will rise and look is it not a corpse? Everything is dead and there are corpses everywhere. Just people and around them silence__that is the world! "Love one another"__who said that? Whose command is that? The pendulum swings unfeelingly, antagonistically. It's two o'clock at night. Her slippers are standing by her bed, as if waiting for her.... No, seriously, when they take her away tomorrow, what shall I do?"


"Nothing matters when you are dead, and, you are dead when nothing matters."



"One first celebrates a 'silver jubilee', then a 'golden jubilee', then a 'diamond jubilee', but even then he goes back again into a pile of wood (cremation)."


"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."


"Prepare to evacuate soul in ten, in nine, eight.Chloe's splashing through the ankle-deep back-up of renal fluid from her failed kidneys.Death will commence in five.Five, four.Around her, a parasitic life spray paints her heart.Four, three.Three, two.Chloe climbs hand-over-hand up the curled lining of her own throat.Death to commence in three, two.Moonlight shines in through the open mout...h.Prepare for the last breath, now.Evacuate.Now.Soul clear of body.Death commences.Now."


"If I could out run the Angel of Death I'd probably die from lack of breath!"


"Everything diminishes and everything is destructible."
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