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

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

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...

…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...

Perhaps one has to have placed life in the center of one’s worldview and valued it as much as I have in order to know that one may not keep it, but must yield it...

She drowned in a coffee cup the size of a swimming pool. It really helped wake me up to my own mortality.

Mortality, and Paternity; the one supposed, the other expressed in the text: Jacob was the Father of Joseph, and that Father dead, and therefore Joseph mourned for him.

I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to...

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...

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...

The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth

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.All mortals owe a debt to death.There’s no one alivewho can...

The decision to be positive is not one that disregards or belittles the sadness that exists. It is rather a conscious choice to focus on the good and to cultivate happiness–genuine happiness. Happiness is not...

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...

He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble....

I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, as a woman alone in...

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...

Mortality is one of the greatest gifts ever bestowed. After a long and fruitful life, we are able to rest.

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 is not love of life without despair about life.

Malady of mortality

I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and her book in my hands. Like a lot of things in my life, I’d just about worn it out, but it was worn out with...

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

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

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...

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.

She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. [..]...

Ignorance of mortality is a comfort.

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.

It is odd that the Bible says, ‘God created man,’ whereas it is the other way round: man has created God. It is odd that the Bible says, ‘The body is mortal, the soul is...

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.

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...

Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we’d slaughter children fresh from...

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...

I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you’ve grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.

A life is not a waste of time

You will always be special to someone. Unless you grow so old, everyone you knew went ahead

Tell me something. Do you believe in God?’Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. ‘What? Who still believes nowadays?”It isn’t that simple. I don’t mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I’m no expert...

Now every mortal has painand 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...

The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years, while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame...

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

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...

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...

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

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

The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we’re likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we’re forced to make difficult choices...

Dès que Séraphine l’a laissé seul, Gontran se jette à genoux au pied du lit ; il enfonce son front dans les draps, mais ne parvient pas à pleurer ; aucun élan ne soulève son...

There are some fights none of us can win.

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

I know exactly what you mean.