Mortality Quotes

An awareness of mortality is a heavy price to pay for sentience

~ Jonathan Maas

In the end, the body betrayed everyone.

~ Gail Tsukiyama

A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They've never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.

~ Peter Watts

The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.

~ Annie Dillard

I was a couple of summers past twenty but I felt there were stones under that frozen, dun earth that were younger than me.

~ Robert Low

life is a battle. it is a struggle renting us time against darkness. It's a fight it will never win. And still in fights. the Universe has no morality. It has no love, no patience. Those are the playthings of Humans..... the seeds of the end are in each beginning.

~ Peter Callaway

No one, in the end, made it out of this life alive.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.

~ Annie Dillard

I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad didn’t see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments.

~ Gemma Files

That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust.

~ George Herbert

Mortality was never designed to torture you. It was designed to test you.

~ Toni Sorenson

Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. But he who garners day by day the good life, he is happiest.

~ Gilbert Murray

But to elude deathis not easy: attempt it who will,he shall go to the place prepared for eachof the sons of men, the soul-bearersdwelling on earth, ordained them by fate:laid fast in that bed, the body shall sleepwhen the feast is done.

~ Michael Alexander

A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver belt; but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder straps of its uniform—and in whose name did it raise the dark pistol barrel?A second, smashing blow hit him on the ear. Then all became quiet. There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.

~ Arthur Koestler

They are now informing me that not only are they better than the powerful, the masters of the world whose spittle they have to lick (not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God orders them to honour those in authority) – not only are they better, but they have a “better time”, or at least will have a better time one day. But enough! enough! I can’t bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated – it seems to me just to stink of lies.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

~ Omar Khayyám

Life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

I know that we have to live each moment because we won’t be here for ever, and that I wouldn’t want to be anyway, because knowing something’s going to end makes you appreciate it more, makes you want to savour every moment.And I know that I won’t sign the Declaration, even if it makes me different, even if it makes me suspicious. Because no one needs to live for ever.I think that sometimes you can outstay your welcome.

~ Gemma Malley

We reach the end of our lives long before we reach the end of ourselves.

~ Marty Rubin

The conversation did not go very well and I began telling him about the people with their trays in the great cafeteria and suggesting that it would have done us more good to go there to be put in mind of our own mortality.

~ Barbara Pym

To die trying is the proudest humans thing.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.

~ Marcus Aurelius

In that place things begin to wear away even as they are built, the living die a little more each day. The sun is too far away, light slides endlessly into night, fire and love consume themselves, the heart tries to warm itself with ashes.

~ Patricia A. Mckillip

I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed.

~ Geraldine Brooks

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

~ Harold Bloom

The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.

~ Sherry Turkle

Ere the horne'd owl hoot Once and twice and thrice there shall Go among the blind brown worms News of thy great burial; When the pomp is passed away, 'Here's a King,' the worms shall say.

~ Adelaide Crapsey

Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.

~ Roy Scranton

I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric productAnd look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.

~ Walt Whitman

The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth

~ William Shakespeare

Hawks with broken wings; lions with broken paws; men with broken hearts, they all have one thing in common: they're all as sure to die as those unbroken.

~ Bruce Crown

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

~ Will Durant

Your life is a sum of counted breaths.With each breath that passesa part of life is lost. That which gives life brings death every moment nearer,and your caravan is led by onewho will not jest with you.

~ Abu'l-'Atahiya

Even if it's being a Beatle for the rest of my life, it's still only a temporary thing.

~ George Harrison

The to-read pile is more than just a physical stack of books: it's a tower of ambitions failed, hopes unrealised, good intentions unfulfilled. Worse still, it's a cold hard reminder of mortality. Already, I have intentions to read more books than I can hope to manage in a normal lifetime. How will this pile of books taunt me when I'm 64?

~ Sam Jordison

It's good to remember…So you know you need to do now,So you know that you ain't got forever just right now,Good to remember death man.

~ Tarell Alvin Mccraney

Wolf Winter,’ she said, her voice small. ‘I wanted to ask about it. You know, what it is.’He was silent for a long time. ‘It's the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal,’ he said. ‘Mortal and alone.

~ Cecilia Ekbäck

It isn't about being fair and equal. It's about the difference between right and wrong. He stared out at the bloody Elinarch. And this was wrong.

~ Jim Butcher

Be Mindful of Death (Memento Mori)

~ Peter Swanson

I write this in the moonlight, straining my ears to hear beyond the cold mechanical clock to the warm biological noises of the night, but my being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless rhythm of time.If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! Crush the infernal machine! Shatter its bland face and rip those cursed hands from their torturous axis of circumscription! I can almost feel the sturdy metal body crumpling beneath my hands, the glass fracturing, the case cracking open, my fingers digging into the guts, spilling springs and delicate gearing. But now, there is now use, now way of stopping time.

~ Ruth Ozeki