Quotes about Mortality
I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
- JM Coetzee
Prose, in his experience, calls for many more words than poetry. There is no point in embarking on prose if one lacks confidence that one will be alive the next day to carry on with the task.
- JM Coetzee
When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.
- JM Coetzee
So what is it, he thought, that binds me to this spot of earth as if to a home I cannot leave? We must all leave home, after all, we must all leave our mothers. Or am I such a child, such a child from such a line of children, that none of us can leave, but have to come back to die here with our heads upon our mothers' laps, I upon hers, she upon her mother's, and so back and back, generation upon generation?
- JM Coetzee
The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.
- Jack Kerouac
You dont have to know a soul to know what I know --- to expect what I'm expecting --- to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day --- When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse
- Jack Kerouac
grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.
- Jack Kerouac
Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.
- John Donne
On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.
- Victor Hugo
When the lungs finally empty of air and begin to fill with the sweetness of heaven's breath, one will realize in that instant that thought they have existed before, only in that moment will they truly have begun to live.
- Tamera Alexander
The soul, which is spirit, can not dwell in dust; it is carried along to dwell in the blood.
- St. Augustine
We are eternal beings. We lived as intelligent spirits before this mortal life. We are now living part of eternity. Our mortal birth was not the beginning; death, which faces all of us, is not the end.
- Ezra Taft Benson