Quotes about Mortality

Black: I see a different truth. Settin right across the table from me. White: Which is? Black: That you must love your brother or die.

The drunk's concern ain't that he's goin to die from drinkin - which he is. It's that he's goin to run out of whiskey fore he gets a chance to do it.

Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality--

How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward to. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that this remained to look forward to, the pure inhuman otherness of death.

When did one come to an end? In which direction was it finished? There was no end, no finish, only this roaring vast space. Did one never get old, never die? That was the clue.

God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days." Why should you and I?

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.

Life is the little that is left over from dying.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most         spiritual poems; And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality, For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul, and of         immortality.

AS THE TIME DRAWS NIGH As the time draws nigh, glooming, a cloud, A dread beyond, of I know not what, darkens me. I shall go forth, I shall traverse The States awhile—but I cannot tell whither or how long; Perhaps soon, some day or night while I am singing, my voice will suddenly cease. O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this? Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us?… And yet it is enough, O soul! O soul! we have positively appear'd—that is enough.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.