mortality Quotes

“But finally it was time for me to return to my mortal world. It was reluctantly that the Lord said good-bye to me and added, “We will save a place at the banquet table for you. You will be eating with us soon, though, if you just remember to watch for the tests and hold to the dragon-ness within that softskin body. Now fare you well.”

“A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream?”

“But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about. Does that make sense?”

“‘But for what end, then, has this world been formed?’ said Candide. ‘To plague us to death,’ answered Martin.”

“Mortality is a totally different state of being. You become more aware of time. I was absolutely content as a naiad. I lived in an unchanging state for what must have been many millennia, never thinking of the future or the past, always looking for amusement, always finding it. Almost no self-awareness.”

“The dead air shapes the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth.”

“Mortality had remained a conveniently hypothetical concept, an idea to ponder in the abstract. Sooner or later the divestiture of such a privileged innocence was inevitable, but when it finally happened the shock was magnified by the sheer superfluity of the carnage…”

“I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not.”

Funny thing, watching gods realize they’ve been mortal all along.

“Whatever happens we both know that I live to be at least forty-three. So don’t worry about it.”

“But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say I’m sorry until it is as meaningless as air.”

“Think little of thy flesh: blood, bones, and a skin; a pretty piece of knit and twisted work, consisting of nerves, veins and arteries; think no more of it, than so.”

“As for life therefore, and death, honour and dishonour, labour and pleasure, riches and poverty, all these things happen unto men indeed, both good and bad, equally; but as things which of themselves are neither good nor bad; because of themselves, neither shameful nor praiseworthy.”

All mortal greatness is but disease.

“The night [Grandmother] died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels—looking for something good. How I wish that Owen Meany could have died as peacefully as that!”

“YOU LET ME DROWN!” Owen said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.”

“The crack of the bat was so unusually sharp and loud for a Little League game that the noise captured even my mother’s wandering attention. She turned her head toward home plate—I guess, to see who had hit such a shot—and the ball struck her left temple, spinning her so quickly that one of her high heels broke and she fell forward, facing the stands, her knees splayed apart, her face hitting the ground first because her hands never moved from her sides (not even to break her fall), which later gave rise to the speculation that she was dead before she touched the earth.”

″[Harry Hoyt] was embarrassed by his mother’s lack of patriotic zeal; it may have been the only time he argued with anyone, but he won the argument—he got to go to Vietnam, where he was killed by one of the poisonous snakes of that region. It was a Russell’s viper and it bit him while he was peeing under a tree; a later revelation was that the tree stood outside a whorehouse, where Harry had been waiting his turn. He was like that; he was a walker—when there was no good reason to walk.”

“I know you think mortality is evidence that they don’t care, but giving us the ability to grow and change and progress and then finish? That was the greatest gift two ageless, eternal, very very stuck gods could think to give the children they love more than anything.”

“I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.”

″[…] this signifies that Aslan will be our good lord, whether he means us to live or die. And all’s one, for that. Now, by my counsel, we shall all kneel and kiss his likeness, and then all shake hands one with another, as true friends that may shortly be parted.”

“IN the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.”

“Oh, let me kiss his hand!” “Let me wipe it first. It smells of mortality.”

“I recall the sun filtering through the magnolia tree outside my office and lighting this scene: Paul seated before me, his beautiful hands exceedingly still, his prophet’s beard full, those dark eyes taking the measure of me . . . I remember thinking ‘You must remember this,’ because what was falling on my retina was precious. And because, in the context of Paul’s diagnosis, I became aware of not just his mortality but my own.”

“If he was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could kill him.”

“I am going to keep on defying you. I am going to shame you with my defiance. You remind me that I am a mere mortal and you are a prince of Faerie. Well, let me remind you that means you have much to lose and I have nothing. You may win in the end, you may ensorcell me and hurt me and humiliate me, but I will make sure you lose everything I can take from you on the way down. I promise you this is the least of what I can do.”

“No matter how careful I am, eventually I’ll make another misstep. I am weak. I am fragile. I am mortal.”

“Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris.”

″‘I shall not die of a cough.’ ‘True – true,’ I replied.”

“There came forth in reply only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick–on account of the dampness of the catacombs.”

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

“But thinking about and being aware of our mortality creates real perspective and urgency. It doesn’t need to be depressing. Because it’s invigorating.”

“It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality.”

“Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.”

“But religion helps us to face our own mortality.” I spoke to her like she was the only person in the room. She stared at me through a curtain of razor cut bangs. “I agree. Religion is a wonderful pacifier for people who are afraid of death. Every religion—”

“We haven’t really got anything worth having for our wishes.′ ‘We’ve had things happening,’ said Robert; ‘that’s always something.’ ‘It’s not enough, unless they’re the right things,’ said Cyril firmly.”

“I hope that this fortune-telling gift the stone seems to have given you is as accurate as your bow’s arrows. If you are wrong, I am afraid a curse will follow us like the Devil’s shadow follows a possessed mortal’s flesh.”

“I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”

“I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband’s pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children’s skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations.”