Mortality Quotes - Page 3

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

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

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

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

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

All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.

Anne Rice

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

Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.

Alexandre Dumas

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

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

Arthur Schopenhauer

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

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

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

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

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

Creating is the closest thing to being immortal.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I'd never understood why anyone would want to live forever. It had always seemed to me that death lent life a certain poignancy, a necessary tension.

Karen Marie Moning

What is life without death, Beneficent? You of all people can answer that question. A never-ending orgy of emptiness that you stuff with meaningless activity. Everything is disposable, including your relationships--especially your your relationships.

Rick Yancey

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.

William Faulkner

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

Marty Rubin

O I will accompany the windUntil the chainOf my white bonesDrifts like fine sandAnd I become compassing.I become the

John Fairfax

It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It's so obvious at that point.

Aimee Bender

Your real name is a mortal name. Now you need one that is immortal, the one that takes the high stage and plays above the rest. You can't be immortal and mortal at the same time.

Keith Buckley

If you want to live forever you are dreadfully dangerous because you're not living now.

Joanna Russ

A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal...

Bertrand Russell

All who live possess eternal life, and few would trade it for an immortal body, if they truly understood what it is to be alive.

Audrey Auden

It was the most fleeting time of day, and maybe that was why it was her favorite. Because if you blinked, if you closed your eyes or turned your head for even the briefest of moments, you might just miss it. And like most things in life, the transient, fleeting nature of the moment made it all the more special.

Kelseyleigh Reber

...as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows life longer than you do.

Angela Carter

The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn't, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.

Atul Gawande

And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.

Haruki Murakami

Hence, in a season of calm weatherThough inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

William Wordsworth

This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

T.S Eliot

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

I have always felt insignificant while thinking in-terms of Deep time, I have always dreaded the fact that however much we struggle, the monuments we build to keep us alive even after we are gone will be erased just in a snap of fingure or a blink of an eye and we will be no more.

Allan Amanyire

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.

Ian McEwan

When the Root and Branch were young, when the Rose still grew unplucked upon the tree; when all our lands were new and green and we danced without care, then, we were immortal... We left those lands for the world where time dwells, dancing, that we might see the passage of the sun and the growing of the world. Here we may die, and where we can fall, and here King ___ has stopped his dancing.

Seanan McGuire

Every time a believer mounts from this earth to paradise, it is an answer to Christ's prayer. A good old divine remarks, "Many times Jesus and His people pull against one another in prayer. You bend your knee in prayer and say 'Father, I will that Thy saints be with me where I am'; Christ says, 'Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused.

John O'Donohue

Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain.

Gene Wolfe

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

I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.

George Gordon Byron

Now that you have been touched by death, you’re going to feel its presence all around you. You’re going to realize your own mortality, and that death can happen at any time to anyone. It’s going to scare you to your core. It did me.

Alex Z. Moores

I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.

Pablo Casals

I know what's wrong with me - I could never stand still for death! Which you've got to do by a certain age, or be ridiculous - you've got to stand there nobly and serene, and let death run his tape on your arms and around your belly and up your crotch until he's got you fitted for that black suit. And I can't, I won't!... So I'm left with wrestling with this anachronistic energy which God has charged me with and I will use it till the dirt is shoveled in my mouth! Life! Life! Fuck death and dying!

Arthur Miller

Accepting one's age and mortality is a sign that you've now become an adult. Once you realize you no longer fit in the same jeans you did when you were 30, and the spicy foods you loved when you were younger now like to revisit you at 2 AM, you come to realize that with aging comes adjustment. And, aging isn't a bad thing - it sure beats the alternative!

James Arlen Dennis

...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?

Gore Vidal

Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.

Anita Brookner

The curse of mortality. You spend the first portion of your life learning, growing stronger, more capable. And then, through no fault of your own, your body begins to fail. You regress. Strong limbs become feeble, keen senses grow dull, hardy constitutions deteriorate. Beauty withers. Organs quit. You remember yourself in your prime, and wonder where that person went. As your wisdom and experience are peaking, your traitorous body becomes a prison.

Brandon Mull

The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I'm not. I'm only afraid of dying wrong.

Ally Condie

One day, while life is being incredible and interesting, I’m going to die.

Agnostic Zetetic

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

Atul Gawande

All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

Herman Melville

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

Darren Shan

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

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

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Mortality Quotes - Page 3

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