mortality

We are all butterflies. Earth is our chrysalis.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

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 in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

I Don__ Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don__ know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don__ know that I wouldn__ deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don__ know on the other hand that I would: I don__ know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don__ know that I mayn__ be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin.

You are like a god, like an immortal one,' she whispered to me one night in our bed, her naked body pressed to mine, our sweat golden and glistening in the candlelight. 'Oh, my love,' I whispered back to her, 'I am more mortal than all. It seems that a part of me dies every night that I lie with you.

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

Real dishes break. That's how you know they're real.

Though mortal Men have little life beside the span of the Elves, they would rather spend it in battle than fly or submit. The defiance of Húrin Thalion is a great deed; and though Morgoth slay the doer he cannot make the deed not to have been. Even the Lords of the West will honour it; and is it not written into the history of Arda, which neither Morgoth nor Manwë can unwrite?

The strangest of our powersIs the courage to liveKnowing that we will die,Knowing nothing more

Pale death kicks with impartial foot at the hovels of the poor and the towers of kings.

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

Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?""Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

For nothing is evil in the beginning.

Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

I never liked hearing anyone say I was the new George Gershwin, because I knew I could have never even carried that man's music case. If George Gershwin hadn't died when he was thirty-nine years old, there is no knowing how much more great music he would have written.

I know now that everything after the accident was merely a tactic to indulge in escapism and self-delusion. When you are hit by a streetcar that almost smashes you to a pulp, when you experience your own end...there is no recovery, only temporary respite, she thought.Pain made me aware of my body. My body made me aware of deterioration and death. That awareness made me old. My death sentence may have been deferred, but I now had to live with a twofold realization. Not only was I going to die__here was nothing unusual about that except that I was made to realize it at a tender age__ut I knew exactly what that meant. Because I had already been through it. Unlike other condemned people for whom death is an abstraction because they have no idea what really awaits them, my stay of death came with a constant reminder, the presence of pain.

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.

Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.