Quotes About Death And Mortality

#1. Once the subject matter of rock n' roll changed from cars and pop love songs to songs about really true love and the blues and death and mortality, this light bulb went off in my head and I went, 'Oh, that's what they're doing. That's kind of - that's art.'

David Chase

#2. We never actively remember death,' Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#3. But maybe life was like that: it held your death, waiting, and you had no choice but to walk toward it if you wanted a life.

Michelle West

#4. When we see our enemies and friends gliding away before us, let us not forget that we are subject to the general law of mortality, and shall soon be where our doom will be fixed forever.

Samuel Johnson

#5. Most people are not really scared of death. They are merely terrified of being taken to a mortuary and/or being buried or cremated and/or being forgotten.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#6. As a beast, he had lived in a world of bliss, acting on his instincts, thinking only when he had to, never seeing himself for what he was, never worrying about his mortality, never trying to cheat death. But now his thoughts and fears ruled him. He knew evil for the first time.

A.G. Riddle

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

Rick Yancey

#8. Pride and power fall when the person falls, but discoveries of truth form legacies that can be built upon for generations.

Criss Jami

#9. Grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away.

V.C. Andrews

#10. There are a few things I've learned over the years. One is that time doesn't stop for anyone; hurdling forward and onward, unstoppable and catastrophic.

Shawn Michael Severud

#11. When we all part from this life and gather on the other side, the only thing each of us will have to share is his own story.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#12. In the Mortality Bills, pneumonia is an easy second, to tuberculosis; indeed in many cities the death-rate is now higher and it has become, to use the phrase of Bunyan 'the captain of the men of death.'

William Osler

#13. Mort isn't my name, of course - I was creative director of mortality, and Dr. Jeth had us all go by titles.

Tom Francis

#14. Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?"

"Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

Paul Kalanithi

#15. The idea that all souls are mortal is the only notion surely terminating love and all its forms.

Criss Jami

#16. 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

#17. Embrace death, dance with it a while, and finally fall prey to it.

Darren Shan

#18. Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

R.D. Laing

#19. There's nothing serious in mortality;
All is but toys; renown, and grace, is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.

William Shakespeare

#20. I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.

T. S. Eliot

#21. God is not someone you meet when you die. His smiling face will be the first and the most familiar to greet you on the other side of mortality. You'll recognize Him and know in your heart of hearts that you're not entering a new sphere, but returning home to the place you've always belonged.

Toni Sorenson

#22. We know, we'll all die one day. Death is the only truth that supersedes any factsheets. Very few get that divine blessings to break the palisade of mortality and believe me we are the chosen few.

Bibhu Datta Rout

#23. The slugs are ascending this steep city staircase that leads up to a huge Catholic church, essentially signifying their slow crawl towards death. The work reminds us of religion, mortality, natural decay, and the slow suffocation of commercialized societies.

Florentijn Hofman

#24. People sometimes find Buddhism pessimistic, saying there is too much talk about death. It's essential to understand that Buddhists don't contemplate death because they are morbid or depressed; they focus on death, mortality, and human frailty as a means of better understanding and appreciating life.

Lama Surya Das

#25. They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.

Ambrose Bierce

#26. You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn't much time left.

Stieg Larsson

#27. My son will wear the title well, the Duke thought, and realized with a sudden chill that this was another death thought.

Frank Herbert

#28. 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

#29. The origin behind myths and religion is human terror of annihilation. Human societies invented mythology and religion in order to militate against people's fear of living a mortal life. People fear time as a destroyer of human happiness, human beings, and human societies.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#30. Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be ...

Margaret Atwood

#31. Becoming a parent gives you access to a whole world of feeling. It gives you a much stronger sense of life and death: becoming a father made me realise my own mortality.

Laurence Fox

#32. I will not stand by and let any man believe his death is an act of one of the gods. They don't deserve the credit. This is just nature, a side effect of mortality - H

Katie Hamstead

#33. If love were human I would've set them on fire by now - a screaming blaze of smoke and flesh. I'd breathe in the blackness once more just to feel love's destruction, its mortality filling in the hollow of my ribcage without a heart.

Piper Payne

#34. The girl in the video is a reminder about how fragile our hold on sanity and health is and how much we are at the utter whim of our Brutus bodies, which will inevitably, on day, turn on us for good. I am a prisoner, as we all are. And with that realization comes an aching sense of vulnerability.

Susannah Cahalan

#35. Fear and hopelessness washed over her. She was looking her own mortality in the face, and it was a horrifying thing to do.

Rose Wynters

#36. Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Alfred Tennyson

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

Alexander Pope

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

Abu'l-'Atahiya

#39. [H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture - and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.

Paul Kalanithi

#40. None of us are getting out of here alive".

R. Alan Woods

#41. Death and pain dominate this world, for though many are cured, they leave still weak, still tremulous, still knowing mortality has whispered to them; have seen in the folding of white bedspreads according to rule the starched pleats of a shroud.

Denise Levertov

#42. You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for.

David Gerrold

#43. You have a bout with death, things that touch your mortality, when that happens, all that bling-bling gets thrown away because all you've got is you and God.

Louis Gossett Jr.

#44. O I will accompany the wind
Until the chain
Of my white bones
Drifts like fine sand
And I become compassing.
I become the wind.

- Song of the Wind

John Fairfax

#45. 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

#46. I'm starting to get older, and began to think about mortality a little more. My mother died in 2003 and that was a big shock. When your parents start to die off, that's going to be a revelation. So for me, this album - although it might sound quite cheery - is really talking about death.

Donald Fagen

#47. But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.

Saul Bellow

#48. And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been.

H. Rider Haggard

#49. [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

#50. Anything that has to deal with our mortality is always going to be interesting to us. Life and death is always going to be something that draws our attention.

Rosario Dawson

#51. Society tells my students that people like them should aspire to prison the same way I understood I would go to college. They only listen to media that reinforces what they've been told all their lives: that they are worthless and that they will die or be incarcerated before they reach twenty-five.

Thomm Quackenbush

#52. Death is never an ending, death is a change;
Death is beautiful, for death is strange;
Death is one dream out of another flowing.

Conrad Aiken

#53. 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

#54. This book carries the urgency of racing against time, of having important things to say. Paul confronted death - examined it, wrestled with it, accepted it - as a physician and a patient. He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality.

Paul Kalanithi

#55. 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

#56. Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

Irvin D. Yalom

#57. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.

C.S. Lewis

#58. He'd learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time.

Rupert Thomson

#59. Awareness of mortality exerts a unique power to focus the mind and heart on essentials.

Columba Stewart

#60. Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.

Caitlin Doughty

#61. Americans in 1763 lived always in the shadow and presence of death. Death was not yet romanticized as it would be in the 19th century, nor yet sanitized as it would be in the 20th century.

Colin G. Calloway

#62. 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

#63. Yes, it will all end one day; but today is worth living.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

#64. Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments. - LEON KASS, CHAIR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON BIOETHICS, 2003

Ray Kurzweil

#65. Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.

H. Rider Haggard

#66. I think that by fearing death, you are actually fearing life because it is a part of life. People are born and people die.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

#67. Shall a man
grave his sorrows upon a stone when he hath but need to write them on
the water? Nay, oh /She/, I will live my day, and grow old with my
generation, and die my appointed death, and be forgotten.

H. Rider Haggard

#68. Pale death kicks with impartial foot at the hovels of the poor and the towers of kings.

Horace

#69. Let it all go, one foot in the grave and one bag packed. We shall go to our end in the warm glow of the past, burning up the memories, all the clutter given back.

Peter R. Pouncey

#70. I think mortality makes you live a fuller existence. When I was a kid I was scared of death, and maybe that's what made me desperate to get the most out of life.

Dolph Lundgren

#71. Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive
a peculiar form of denial of our mortality?

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

#72. Life must go on, yes, but in the end - after the end - life was not important, just pictures on a screen, absorbing for as long as they lasted, causing us to weep and laugh, perhaps, but when the images are gone we step out blinking into the light.

Stephen Volk

#73. We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.

Siri Hustvedt

#74. I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.

Ayn Rand

#75. Looking mortality straight in the eyeis n easy feat. To avoid the exercise, we choose to stay blindfolded, in the dark as to the realities of death and dying. But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror.

Caitlin Doughty

#76. When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity.

Alix Kates Shulman

#77. Personally I don't endorse the notion of mortality. It's fine for other folk, but I disapprove of the concept for me and my loved ones. Seems unfair that we're not allowed to vote on the matter and not one of us is excused. Who made up that rule? - Kinsey Millhone

Sue Grafton

#78. The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra.

William T. Vollmann

#79. Oh you, my generation!- we were a lovely lot! Sharp minds- arguing all the time and brittle bodies and even more brittle laughter- and all the time knowing that we were growing up to die.

Joan Wehlen Morrison

#80. [In "The Night Gwen Stacy Died"], death took on an existential quality -- the beloved, innocent but weak Gwen is merely a victim, the casualty of a war between superpowered rivals -- and as such the episode proved a turning point int eh genre's depiction of mortality.

Jose Alaniz

#81. 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

#82. And as to you death, and you bitter hug of mortality ... it is idle to try to alarm me

Walt Whitman

#83. You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.

Joseph Conrad

#84. Krishna was once asked what was the most miraculous thing in all creation, and he replied, That a man should wake each morning and believe deep in his heart that he will live forever, even though he knows that he is doomed.

Christopher Pike