Mortality Quotes

Of all the elements in the periodic table, not a single one is indestructible.

~ Marty Rubin

Creating is the closest thing to being immortal.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Shall a mangrave his sorrows upon a stone when he hath but need to write them onthe water? Nay, oh /She/, I will live my day, and grow old with mygeneration, and die my appointed death, and be forgotten.

~ H. Rider Haggard

The music is happy; the laughter is happy. Everything feels ecstatic and desperate. Blurrily, I think of sex, and I think of death. I realize: Every moment of joyous celebration contains the seed of death.

~ Laura Rose Wagner

I sometimes think that never blows so redThe Rose as where some buried Caesar bled,That every Hyacinth the Garden wearsDropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.

~ Omar Khayyám

It’s hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I’m bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is going to be very long because each instant is. The impression is that I’m still to be born and I can’t quite manage it.

~ Clarice Lispector

Each October I walk into the woodslooking for bones: rabbit skulls,a grackle spine, the pelvis of a deerwith the blood bleached out. What diedin the lush of roses and mintshines out from the tangle of twigsthat bind it to the placeof its last leaping. The living lackthat kind of clarity. In late April,when the water spreads out and outtill everything is lilies and seepage,there is only the mystery of tracks,a rustle receding in the many reeds.And so the bones accumulateacross my windowsill: the flightlesswings and exaggerated grins,the silent unmoving remindersof where the glories of April lead.

~ Charles Rafferty

I now inhabit a life I don't deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon

~ David Carr

A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.

~ Bertrand Russell

Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,like winter, which even now is passing.For beneath the winter is a winter so endlessthat to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.Climb praising as you return to connection.Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.The emptiness inside you allows you to vibratein full resonance with your world. Use it for once.To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayablenumbers of beings abounding in Nature,add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

~ Ernest Hemingway

A small fact:You are going to die....does this worry you?

~ Markus Zusak

Life is only precious because it ends, kid.

~ Rick Riordan

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

~ Voltaire

There is not love of life without despair about life.

~ Albert Camus

On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!

~ Mikhail Bulgakov

Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.

~ Thomas Bernhard

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

~ Anthony Marra

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

~ Juan Rulfo

As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.

~ Anne Rice

Death, only death, can break the lasting chain;And here, ev'n then, shall my cold dust remain

~ Alexander Pope

Each of us is merely a small instrument; all of us, after accomplishing our mission, will disappear.

~ Mother Teresa

Yet at the last Beren was slain by the Wolf that came from the gates of Angband, and he died in the arms of Tinúviel. But she chose mortality, and to die from the world, so that she might follow him; and it is sung that they met again beyond the Sundering Seas, and after a brief time walking alive once more in the green woods, together they passed, long ago, beyond the confines of this world. So it is that Lúthien Tinúviel alone of the Elf-kindred has died indeed and left the world, and they have lost her whom they most loved.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

I am simply looking for a companion with whom to spend my days, a companion who will cherish as much as I the stupidity of living in the moment, and spend every dull, amazing second with me.

~ Heidi Julavits

We know summer is the height of of being alive. We don't believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we're only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better then the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts center up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoo's Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived your summertime best? What is you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana?

~ Gary Shteyngart

Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.

~ Peter S. Beagle

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

~ Iris Murdoch

This is to be mortal, And seek the things beyond mortality.

~ George Gordon Byron

What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.

~ Gene Wolfe

The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness.

~ Raquel Cepeda

Even if their supplies of love are finite, they've figured out that life is, too, and they're no longer rationing.

~ Julianna Baggott

And if I were to open you up - would you see anything less remarkable? Less intricately dazzling, in its squelching, spongy way? Lungs and heart and spleen, and all the rest - ticking away, as it were? Yet you walk down the boulevard, and pass any number of such wonderful devices, all ticking away as they walk, and think it no great marvel.

~ K.w. Jeter

There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace.

~ Wilkie Collins

Were it not Folly, Spider-like to spinThe Thread of present Life away to win-What? for ourselves, who know not if we shallBreathe out the very Breath we now breathe in!

~ Omar Khayyám

I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.

~ Neal Stephenson

Me, I'm living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino's disease, which could lay me in the grave most anytime. Not that I mind too much; I've done everything I ever wanted to do. But ... as you know, one would like to continue doing the good things over and over again, so long as there's pleasure in it.

~ Edward Abbey