Mortality Quotes

BugleBlack beetles know where the most recent bonesbake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone, bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine --drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone--they will lead you to a barren gulchsurrounded by sages and nettles, dirtburnt to powdery sand and sharp thorns. Hunchabove the skeleton, bow your head, start reciting verses you learned as a child, there, under the sun with rocks and brush, bare locust tree a telling reliquary of dust to dust, all so brutally hot. You must pull ribs from that rotting body,words that matter: love me, love me not.

~ Tod Marshall

But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

~ Ernest Hemingway

There are some fights none of us can win.

~ Amy Rae Durreson

he had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.

~ Mary Doria Russell

And we went through AIDS... which was as good a course in mortality as anyone is likely to get, short of war.

~ Stephen Greco

Can you hear me? Sighing. You were right. My requiem is well prepared. Still to be written is the poem that is never complete, an endless rubbing on the ink block, an endless dipping of the pen, an endless swoop over the white paper, the poem of my life. I will try to write it down. Soon, no, now, I will try. The first line. I called him Necktie. I will write: He taught me to see with eyes of feeling.

~ Milena Michiko Flašar

If you don't make peace with your own mortality, you'll never know what it's like to truly be alive.

~ Moxie Mezcal

Your faces are very beautiful,but they are wooden cages.You had better run from me.My words are fire.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

The vast and terrible depth.“Of course,” he said.“The inexhaustibility.”“I understand.”“The whole huge nameless thing.”“Yes, absolutely.”“The massive darkness.”“Certainly, certainly.”“The whole terrible endless hugeness.”“I know exactly what you mean.

~ Don Delillo

I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and her book in my hands. Like a lot of things in my life, I'd just about worn it out, but it was worn out with love, and that's the best kind of worn-out there is. Maybe we're like all those used cars, broken hand tools, articles of old clothing, scratched record albums, and dog-eared books. Maybe there really isn't any such thing as mortality; that life simply wears us out with love.

~ Craig Johnson

I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, as a woman alone in a large house refrains from looking into mirrors, and instead busies herself with trivial errands, so that she may catch no glimpse of the thing whose feet she hears at times on the stairs.

~ Gene Wolfe

She's thirty-four years old. In fifty, sixty years, she'll be dead, and everything reminds her of this fact but him. With Arnie, she imagines she might live forever.

~ David James Poissant

I should like to ask you:-Does your childhood seem far off? Do the days when you sat at your mother's knee, seem days of very long ago?Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by my many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me. I understand the feeling! exclaimed Carton, with a bright flush. And you are the better for it?I hope so.

~ Charles Dickens

[T]he habit of living as if in the shadow of death has remained with me, and I consider that, too, a gift.

~ Sonia Sotomayor

You will not be here--I shall not be here--much lo

~ A.s. Byatt

The most optimistic part of life is its mortality… God is a real genius.

~ Rana Zahid Iqbal

I do not understand how you know you only have one life if you have never died, because if you have never died, then you cannot possibly know if you would go on living a second life, or go on living no more lives.

~ Cassandra Kemper

The seeds of life - fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled by limbs and flesh that's born for death. That is the source of all men's fears and longings, joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heaven's light, shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep.

~ Virgil

The things that frighten us most are those that remind us of our fragile existence

~ Sumiko Saulson

Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we’d slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don’t. We wrap them in warm cloth and we sing to them and feed them milk as if it might all go on forever.

~ Daniel Abraham

I don't think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is.

~ Anne Rice

You will always be special to someone. Unless you grow so old, everyone you knew went ahead

~ Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Without time, you have only the bottomless, shapeless mire of eternity....Time is what gives life significance.

~ J.r. Ward

In my mind, I gave the woman gifts. I gave her a candle stub. I gave her a box of wooden kitchen matches. I gave her a cake of Lifebuoy soap. I gave her a ceilingful of glow-in-the-dark planets. I gave her a bald baby doll. I gave her a ripe fig, sweet as new wood, and a milkdrop from its stem. I gave her a peppermint puff. I gave her a bouquet of four roses. I gave her fat earthworms for her grave. I gave her a fish from Roebuck Lake, a vial of my sweat for it to swim in.

~ Lewis Nordan

Your death rides a fast camel.

~ Victor Robert Lee

Here, Mortimer Wheeler thought, is power. And a reminder of our mortality.

~ Robert M. Edsel

Over the years, I have developed a visceral reaction to families and victims expressing surprise at tragedy. Why are we surprised? Why do we forget we are mortal? Bad, bad things happen everywhere, every day. Humans, for better or worse, harbor this feeling that we - individually - are special. A patch of ice or a pea-sized blood clot makes a mockery of that illusion in a heartbeat. We are not special at all.

~ Michael Perry

In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

~ John F. Kennedy

Maybe I'll have a tumour like his someday. At first it will be a small but growing sphere that will branch out, growing larger in my stomach like a fetus. I will probably feel it when it starts to take motion, moving inward with the fury of a sleepwalking child, traveling through my intestines blindly -

~ Gabriel García Márquez

You're mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.

~ Rick Yancey

Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.

~ Bruce Sterling

How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?

~ Malcolm X

Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo... No, that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I'm asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believe it completely, believe not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy...?

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause of the populace. Just as it was started on its first day, so it will run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere will it delay.

~ Seneca

I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.

~ Annie Dillard

We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What's the trouble?

~ H.g. Wells

I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.

~ Jennifer Dubois

Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.

~ Connie Willis

Morbidity and Mortality RoundsForgive me, body before me, for this.Forgive me for my bumbling hands, unschooledin how to touch: I meant to understandwhat fever was, not love. Forgive me formy stare, but when I look at you, I seemyself laid bare. Forgive me, body, forwhat seems like calculation when I takea breath before I cut you with my knife,because the cancer has to be removed.Forgive me for not telling you, but I’mno poet. Please forgive me, please. Forgivemy gloves, my callous greeting, my unease—you must not realize I just met deathagain. Forgive me if I say he lookedimpatient. Please, forgive me my despair,which once seemed more like recompense. Forgivemy greed, forgive me for not having moreto give you than this bitter pill. Forgive:for this apology, too late, for thoselike me whose crimes might seem innocuousand yet whose cruelty was obvious.Forgive us for these sins. Forgive me, please,for my confusing heart that sounds so muchlike yours. Forgive me for the night, when Isleep too, beside you under the same moon.Forgive me for my dreams, for my rough knees,for giving up too soon. Forgive me, please,for losing you, unable to forgive.

~ Rafael Campo

He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when.

~ Giulio Tononi