mortality

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
69ba6ef	I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.	live mortality life fountainhead die	Ayn Rand
6273377	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.	mortality	Ernest Hemingway
bb9dfd8	Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.	mortality	Markus Zusak
063e142	No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.	mortality death clockwork-princess i-can-t-even omg-my-feels the-infernal-devices cassandra-clare dying	Cassandra Clare
d19aeac	Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.	sleep mortality immortality death life live-forever forgetting forget	H. Rider Haggard
0229d52	Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.	mortality humor patience	Neil Gaiman
608cee6	To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.	fathers mortality death religion god daughters yeats fatherhood	Christopher Hitchens
29f2355	You have to give up! you have to give up! You have to realize that someday you will die, Until you know that, you are useless!	mortality	Chuck Palahniuk
83f0b16	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.	mortality	Brandon Mull
6908da4	We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust. That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust.	mortality inspiration	David Levithan
a5210e3	"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."	mortality vampire	Christopher Pike
81014d4	I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.	mortality past	Marilynne Robinson
5863469	The story of my recent life.' I like that phrase. It makes more sense than 'the story of my life', because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality- and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.	mortality life inspirational	Mitch Albom
0579f9d	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.	photography mortality	Ian McEwan
dd3b490	The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care	mortality bravery morality death science inspirational cancer doctors belief medicine atheism inevitable knowledge honor	Lance Armstrong
631459a	Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life--a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple--the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last--it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer--there it is.	mortality	Donna Tartt
247cb6c	For nothing is evil in the beginning.	fate mortality	J.R.R. Tolkien
48e39b0	Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you. Have you given much thought to our mortal condition? Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen. There's no one alive who can say if he will be tomorrow. Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery. No one can teach it, no one can grasp it. Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink! But don't forget Aphrodite--that's You can let the rest go. Am I making sense? I think so. How about a drink. Put on a garland. I'm sure the happy splash of wine will cure your mood. We're all mortal you know. Think mortal. Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,	mortality death sadness happiness life cheer comedy	Anne Carson
92a8c20	All men live enveloped in whale-lines. 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. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.	mortality	Herman Melville
2c0a078	Yet at the last Beren was slain by the Wolf that came from the gates of Angband, and he died in the arms of Tinuviel. 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 Luthien Tinuviel alone of the Elf-kindred has died indeed and left the world, and they have lost her whom they most loved.	mortality tinuviel luthien	J.R.R. Tolkien
f779b98	If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems... How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon?...Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true--anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other--beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn't, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.	mortality	James Baldwin
0f0d951	The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused.	mortality	John O'Donohue
d3d649b	In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I've thought a great deal about my life and my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out.	mortality death life	Cormac McCarthy
46f5bce	Grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away.	death-and-dying pain grief mortality sadness truth grief-and-loss-quotes pain-goes-away death-of-a-loved-one grief-and-loss grieve truth-of-life	V.C. Andrews
f6fbc82	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.	mortality	Iris Murdoch
727becb	Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.	mortality living life	Anne Carson
a72ffe1	This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.	mortality poetry	T.S. Eliot
0046a34	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.	lovers mortality death life love	H. Rider Haggard
130bd59	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.	death-and-dying mortality	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
f9e5bc2	To Suspect your Own Mortality is to Know the Beginning of Terror; To Learn Irrefutably that you are mortal is to Know the End of Terror.	mortality	Frank Herbert
d81a066	Take too much time, and time will take you.	time mortality inspiring motivational inspirational seize-the-day motivating carpe-diem mortal	Lisa Kleypas
46fe7ba	The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.	mortality morality	vladimir nabokov
edb4468	That which is alive hath known death, and that which is dead can never die, for in the Circle of the Spirit life is naught and death is naught. Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.	mortality immortality death life circle-of-life	H. Rider Haggard
6be6ea3	If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.	mortality death life	Madeleine L'Engle
01bd2d9	Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries.	fathers mortality sons writers	Christopher Hitchens
27e1fa7	Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity.	time mortality	Margaret George
57971fd	We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.	mortality	Colum McCann
7bab957	Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.	mortality life margaret-atwood the-robber-bride life-is-short	Margaret Atwood
191b487	When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.	mortality	Joan Didion
e809fed	All men live enveloped in whale-lines. 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.	mortality	Herman Melville
ad4f7c8	Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.	loneliness hate mortality immortality friends love lifeboat stranded desperate blame society enemies guilt mental-illness	Joseph Conrad
1e22aae	"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."	mortality fear-of-death the-unknown	Don DeLillo
3e98976	No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists.	mortality humanity elijah robots	Isaac Asimov
d22e80b	Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.	mortality	Alexandre Dumas
c63516c	"The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.	mortality death religion soul	Michael Chabon
7aa31bd	The song is an unvarnished love shout, an implorement tinged with...anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosoher, the anger of a pot. An anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away, that we're being shown marvels but reminded always that they don't belong to us. They're sultans' treasures; we're lucky, we're expected to feel lucky to have been invited to see them at all.	mortality life preciousness life-and-death	Michael Cunningham
28b3db2	To die trying is the proudest humans thing.	mortality self-sacrifice	Robert A. Heinlein
4c26b29	"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."	war mortality right-and-wrong	Jim Butcher
8091983	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.	time mortality death generations	Annie Dillard
bc96e89	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.	mortality immortality	H. Rider Haggard
d90c95b	It is worse than useless to do things halfway Bee, for then you think the work is done, but someone must come behind you later to do it all over again. Even if you must work much harder and get less done, it is better to do the whole task the first time.	mortality work	Robin Hobb
062172f	"I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere back in Baltimore. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watching six-year-olds learn to surf, or at colleges listening to sophomores slip from English to Italian, or at cafes seeing young poets flip though "The Waste Land," or listening to the radio where economists explain economic things that I could've explored in my lost years, mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, have not yet run out of time, though I know that we all run out of time, and some of us run out of it faster."	mourning mortality wonder meaning wasted-time inertia purpose regret knowledge	Ta-Nehisi Coates
2fa74c9	Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This gawky wormbent tabernacle.	mortality body	Cormac McCarthy
5a75012	There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.	murder mortality depression fear-no-evil no-rhyme-or-reason psalm-23 reason-or-rhyme valley-of-the-shadow-of-death senselessness disaster storms fear-of-death	Joseph Conrad
72b08b5	This last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me when my great deeds were ended.	war heroism mortality soldiers trauma	E.R. Eddison
32948ba	To accept a little death is worse than death itself.	mortality depression fatalism	Frank Herbert
0b8dadb	"Phoebe asked me, "Tell me, what do you think of the afterlife?" I was a bit nonplussed. I had no idea what she thought, but I knew that the question must be of greater interest to someone of her age than to me. But our conversation had been completely honest, and before I could speak, honesty and tact had joined hands in my answer. "I have no faith at all," I said, "but sometimes I have hope." I rather think," she replied, "that total annihilation is the most comfortable position." I was shaken. The horse clopped on. The children laughed behind us. When I die," she said, "I don't expect to see any of my loved ones again. I'll just become a part of all this." She waved her hand at the surrounding countryside. "That's all right with me."	mortality nature life	Sena Jeter Naslund
df9ae36	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.	mortality greek-tragedy	Gilbert Murray
a11454c	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?	mortality life	H.G. Wells
1b6f681	He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.	existence mortality non-existence non-fiction essay impermanence oblivion	Milan Kundera
595c27e	I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.	mortality depression death sadness dark-sky grey-sky overcast morose doomed temporal depressing lost-love pity	Joseph Conrad
50366ad	You will die, and I, and all we can create--why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge.	mortality optimism barratong knowledge	John Brunner
8641e47	You know, it's really very peculiar. To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.	mortality immortality living life philosophy dying	Milan Kundera
6df246e	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.	mortality tender-indifference	Arthur Koestler
6ed9bbd	My son will wear the title well, the Duke thought, and realized with a sudden chill that this was another death thought.	mortality leadership heritage legacy parenthood	Frank Herbert
26d6d06	Without time, you have only the bottomless, shapeless mire of eternity....Time is what gives life significance.	mortality	J.R. Ward
73044a4	Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.	mortality meaning living life	Muriel Spark
3d790f5	This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.	mortality	Michael Cunningham
821b622	Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.	mortality	Barbara Kingsolver
8d01b76	"Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. 'What did they	metaphor time mortality immortality death life title speech	David Mitchell
5075e35	The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.	mortality	Harold Bloom
805c61c	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.	mortality love	Lewis Nordan
5c072e4	The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don't change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through anew identity and new purpose, whether it's that of a nation or a single human being.	mortality identity love crisis	Rebecca Solnit
67b225f	...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?	mortality death philosophy libanius philosophy-of-death aging	Gore Vidal
d503bb8	For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on.	mortality immortality life certainty delusion	Ray Bradbury
61cdf67	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.	mortality	Neal Stephenson
d221448	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.	mortality love impermanence	Annie Dillard
e5891b3	I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin: My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grow (that my father may have planted the day I was born), the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories... My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory, I shall look at a few old yellowing photographs with broken edges without recognising them... Space melts like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds: To write: To try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.	time mortality writing space memory	Georges Perec
c7b6c0c	As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you?	mortality the-sea-the-sea iris-murdoch morbid	Iris Murdoch
22df83d	...you know everybody has a turn, and you just try to find something interesting every day to make you glad it hasn't happened yet.	mortality purpose	Tananarive Due
1d5c046	It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It's so obvious at that point.	mortality immortality	Aimee Bender
473fa3a	You will not be here--I shall not be here--much longer.'	time mortality love	A.S. Byatt
a1615f1	We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.	mortality god life	Elizabeth Gilbert
0757d45	Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants.	mortality life temporality impermanence	Ruth Ozeki
2a7e937	...and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.	mortality humanity	Mohsin Hamid
9a7e30b	Pitiful, puling, like all your kin the slave of time that rots the body before the mind has seen more than a single flower in all the meadows of the Cosmos.	mortality humanity	Barbara Hambly
c42f6da	It's quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor education.	mortality	Umberto Eco
3e75262	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.	mortality western	Mary Doria Russell
0d0b856	"First the colors. Then the humans. That's usually how I see things. Or at least, how I try.	mortality humanity death rhyming the-book-thief fact humans	Markus Zusak
78fc8be	The light is fading from the day. The rest is darkness and dismay.	mortality depression melancholia	Edward Gorey
0dcfc82	Murder was a fascination as always.	violence mortality entertainment distraction	Erik Larson

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

Ayn Rand

6273377

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.

mortality

Ernest Hemingway

bb9dfd8

Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

mortality

Markus Zusak

063e142

No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.

mortality death clockwork-princess i-can-t-even omg-my-feels the-infernal-devices cassandra-clare dying

Cassandra Clare

d19aeac

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

sleep mortality immortality death life live-forever forgetting forget

H. Rider Haggard

0229d52

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

mortality humor patience

Neil Gaiman

608cee6

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

fathers mortality death religion god daughters yeats fatherhood

Christopher Hitchens

29f2355

You have to give up! you have to give up! You have to realize that someday you will die, Until you know that, you are useless!

mortality

Chuck Palahniuk

83f0b16

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.

mortality

Brandon Mull

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We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust. That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust.

mortality inspiration

David Levithan

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"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."

mortality vampire

Christopher Pike

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I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

mortality past

Marilynne Robinson

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The story of my recent life.' I like that phrase. It makes more sense than 'the story of my life', because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality- and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.

mortality life inspirational

Mitch Albom

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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.

photography mortality

Ian McEwan

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The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care

mortality bravery morality death science inspirational cancer doctors belief medicine atheism inevitable knowledge honor

Lance Armstrong

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Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life--a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple--the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last--it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer--there it is.

mortality

Donna Tartt

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For nothing is evil in the beginning.

fate mortality

J.R.R. Tolkien

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Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you. Have you given much thought to our mortal condition? Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen. There's no one alive who can say if he will be tomorrow. Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery. No one can teach it, no one can grasp it. Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink! But don't forget Aphrodite--that's You can let the rest go. Am I making sense? I think so. How about a drink. Put on a garland. I'm sure the happy splash of wine will cure your mood. We're all mortal you know. Think mortal. Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,

mortality death sadness happiness life cheer comedy

Anne Carson

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All men live enveloped in whale-lines. 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. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

mortality

Herman Melville

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Yet at the last Beren was slain by the Wolf that came from the gates of Angband, and he died in the arms of Tinuviel. 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 Luthien Tinuviel alone of the Elf-kindred has died indeed and left the world, and they have lost her whom they most loved.

mortality tinuviel luthien

J.R.R. Tolkien

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If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems... How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon?...Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true--anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other--beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn't, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.

mortality

James Baldwin

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

mortality

John O'Donohue

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In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I've thought a great deal about my life and my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out.

mortality death life

Cormac McCarthy

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

death-and-dying pain grief mortality sadness truth grief-and-loss-quotes pain-goes-away death-of-a-loved-one grief-and-loss grieve truth-of-life

V.C. Andrews

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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.

mortality

Iris Murdoch

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Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.

mortality living life

Anne Carson

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This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

mortality poetry

T.S. Eliot

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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.

lovers mortality death life love

H. Rider Haggard

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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.

death-and-dying mortality

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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To Suspect your Own Mortality is to Know the Beginning of Terror; To Learn Irrefutably that you are mortal is to Know the End of Terror.

mortality

Frank Herbert

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Take too much time, and time will take you.

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Lisa Kleypas

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The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

mortality morality

vladimir nabokov

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That which is alive hath known death, and that which is dead can never die, for in the Circle of the Spirit life is naught and death is naught. Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.

mortality immortality death life circle-of-life

H. Rider Haggard

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If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

mortality death life

Madeleine L'Engle

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Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries.

fathers mortality sons writers

Christopher Hitchens

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Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity.

time mortality

Margaret George

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We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.

mortality

Colum McCann

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Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.

mortality life margaret-atwood the-robber-bride life-is-short

Margaret Atwood

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When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

mortality

Joan Didion

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All men live enveloped in whale-lines. 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.

mortality

Herman Melville

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Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

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Joseph Conrad

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"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."

mortality fear-of-death the-unknown

Don DeLillo

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No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists.

mortality humanity elijah robots

Isaac Asimov

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Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.

mortality

Alexandre Dumas

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"The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.

mortality death religion soul

Michael Chabon

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The song is an unvarnished love shout, an implorement tinged with...anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosoher, the anger of a pot. An anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away, that we're being shown marvels but reminded always that they don't belong to us. They're sultans' treasures; we're lucky, we're expected to feel lucky to have been invited to see them at all.

mortality life preciousness life-and-death

Michael Cunningham

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To die trying is the proudest humans thing.

mortality self-sacrifice

Robert A. Heinlein

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"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."

war mortality right-and-wrong

Jim Butcher

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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.

time mortality death generations

Annie Dillard

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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.

mortality immortality

H. Rider Haggard

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It is worse than useless to do things halfway Bee, for then you think the work is done, but someone must come behind you later to do it all over again. Even if you must work much harder and get less done, it is better to do the whole task the first time.

mortality work

Robin Hobb

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"I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere back in Baltimore. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watching six-year-olds learn to surf, or at colleges listening to sophomores slip from English to Italian, or at cafes seeing young poets flip though "The Waste Land," or listening to the radio where economists explain economic things that I could've explored in my lost years, mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, have not yet run out of time, though I know that we all run out of time, and some of us run out of it faster."

mourning mortality wonder meaning wasted-time inertia purpose regret knowledge

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This gawky wormbent tabernacle.

mortality body

Cormac McCarthy

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There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.

murder mortality depression fear-no-evil no-rhyme-or-reason psalm-23 reason-or-rhyme valley-of-the-shadow-of-death senselessness disaster storms fear-of-death

Joseph Conrad

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This last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me when my great deeds were ended.

war heroism mortality soldiers trauma

E.R. Eddison

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To accept a little death is worse than death itself.

mortality depression fatalism

Frank Herbert

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"Phoebe asked me, "Tell me, what do you think of the afterlife?" I was a bit nonplussed. I had no idea what she thought, but I knew that the question must be of greater interest to someone of her age than to me. But our conversation had been completely honest, and before I could speak, honesty and tact had joined hands in my answer. "I have no faith at all," I said, "but sometimes I have hope." I rather think," she replied, "that total annihilation is the most comfortable position." I was shaken. The horse clopped on. The children laughed behind us. When I die," she said, "I don't expect to see any of my loved ones again. I'll just become a part of all this." She waved her hand at the surrounding countryside. "That's all right with me."

mortality nature life

Sena Jeter Naslund

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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.

mortality greek-tragedy

Gilbert Murray

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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?

mortality life

H.G. Wells

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He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.

existence mortality non-existence non-fiction essay impermanence oblivion

Milan Kundera

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I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.

mortality depression death sadness dark-sky grey-sky overcast morose doomed temporal depressing lost-love pity

Joseph Conrad

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You will die, and I, and all we can create--why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge.

mortality optimism barratong knowledge

John Brunner

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You know, it's really very peculiar. To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.

mortality immortality living life philosophy dying

Milan Kundera

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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.

mortality tender-indifference

Arthur Koestler

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

mortality leadership heritage legacy parenthood

Frank Herbert

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

mortality

J.R. Ward

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Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

mortality meaning living life

Muriel Spark

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This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

mortality

Michael Cunningham

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Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

mortality

Barbara Kingsolver

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"Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. 'What did they

metaphor time mortality immortality death life title speech

David Mitchell

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The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

mortality

Harold Bloom

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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.

mortality love

Lewis Nordan

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The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don't change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through anew identity and new purpose, whether it's that of a nation or a single human being.

mortality identity love crisis

Rebecca Solnit

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

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Gore Vidal

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For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on.

mortality immortality life certainty delusion

Ray Bradbury

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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.

mortality

Neal Stephenson

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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.

mortality love impermanence

Annie Dillard

e5891b3

I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin: My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grow (that my father may have planted the day I was born), the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories... My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory, I shall look at a few old yellowing photographs with broken edges without recognising them... Space melts like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds: To write: To try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.

time mortality writing space memory

Georges Perec

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As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you?

mortality the-sea-the-sea iris-murdoch morbid

Iris Murdoch

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...you know everybody has a turn, and you just try to find something interesting every day to make you glad it hasn't happened yet.

mortality purpose

Tananarive Due

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

mortality immortality

Aimee Bender

473fa3a

You will not be here--I shall not be here--much longer.'

time mortality love

A.S. Byatt

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We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.

mortality god life

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants.

mortality life temporality impermanence

Ruth Ozeki

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...and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.

mortality humanity

Mohsin Hamid

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Pitiful, puling, like all your kin the slave of time that rots the body before the mind has seen more than a single flower in all the meadows of the Cosmos.

mortality humanity