Mortality Quotes - Page 2

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

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?" "I do," Dunbar told him. "Why?" Clevinger asked. "What else is there?

Joseph Heller

Bugle"Black 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

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

the unconscious is so seductive because mortality is alien to it

Dean Cavanagh

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

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

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

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

George Bernard Shaw

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

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

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

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Mortality Quotes - Page 2

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