Aging is a mortal term that my immortal spirit doesn’t quite grasp.

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.

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.

I think Dad wanted to feel the pain, to feel his body cry, an urgent reminder that he was still alive. I pretended not to notice.

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

Morbidity and Mortality RoundsForgive me, body before me, for this.Forgive me for my bumbling hands, unschooledin how to touch: I meant to understandwhat fever was, not love. Forgive me formy stare, but when I look at you, I seemyself laid bare. Forgive me, body, forwhat seems like calculation when I takea breath before I cut...

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

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

I knew the end would come, one day. I knew my life deserved to be over. Yet, even knowing that, I was no less fearful.

And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.

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...

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

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet’s four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer...

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...

A small fact:You are going to die….does this worry you?

Even if their supplies of love are finite, they’ve figured out that life is, too, and they’re no longer rationing.

Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.

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

Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.

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...

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

Over the years, I have developed a visceral reaction to families and victims expressing surprise at tragedy. Why are we surprised? Why do we forget we are mortal? Bad, bad things happen everywhere, every day. Humans, for better or worse, harbor this feeling that we – individually – are special. A patch of ice or...

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

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...

It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat...

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...

We are all butterflies. Earth is our chrysalis.

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

We’re all drowning, but don’t say it out loud.

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.

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

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.

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.

There is only one true wealth in all the universe–living time.

We are temporarily immortal, until we have fulfilled God’s plans for our lives…then we become temporarily mortal, waiting to become permanently immortal at last

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

We’re all trying to come to terms with our mortality. Well, except for me, because I plan to live forever through the miracle of cloning.

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!

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

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.

Wolf Winter,’ she said, her voice small. ‘I wanted to ask about it. You know, what it is.’He was silent for a long time. ‘It’s the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal,’ he said. ‘Mortal and alone.

Unless there is swift intervention, growing numbers of people will become severely malnourished and the mortality rate will rapidly accelerate.

Human says time goes by -Time says human goes by

The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but...

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

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.

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

You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene habits play a major role in child mortality. Bringing basic services to Africa’s women and girls could transform their lives and boost child survival in the region.

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