I Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don’t know that I...

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.

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...

The healthy should be reminded that we are all dying because it is through our own reminder of mortality that we accelerate our good intentions, into actions people can see.

They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or...

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...

Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between–Is my journey’s end coming?

This is to be mortal, And seek the things beyond mortality.

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...

Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there’s the trick!

Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

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.

I don’t take things for granted, because everything feels more fragile. It’s made me wonder about mortality and how long you’ve got somebody in the world. I’m more fearful than I used to be.

You have never talked to a mere mortal.

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,...

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

Lo! ’tis a gala nightWithin the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedightIn veils, and drowned in tears,Sit in a theatre, to seeA play of hopes and fears […]

Having always observed that most of them who constantly took in the weekly Bills of Mortality made little other use of them than to look at the foot how the burials increased or decreased, and...

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.

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.

It is the way of mortals. They fling themselves at life and emerge broken.

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

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

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...

For nothing is evil in the beginning.

Mortality defines the human condition.

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.

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....

Creating is the closest thing to being immortal.

Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it...

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more...

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

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.

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...

“Holy shit, I’m going to die!” Sorry, I just turned thirty yesterday, so my mortality is on my mind.

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.

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...

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...

The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness.

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

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...

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

Pride and power fall when the person falls, but discoveries of truth form legacies that can be built upon for generations.

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.

Think not, O Mortal, vainly gay.That Thou from Human Woes is free,The bitter cup I drink today,Tomorrow may be drunk by thee.

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,...

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...

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon.It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing hecould be told.It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did...

The end is never worth the beginning.

You will not be here–I shall not be here–much longer.”Let us not think of time.”We have reached Faust’s non-plus. We say to every moment “Verweile doch, du bist so sch&oumln,” and if we are not...