mortality

How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?

We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.

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

This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, as a woman alone in a large house refrains from looking into mirrors, and instead busies herself with trivial errands, so that she may catch no glimpse of the thing whose feet she hears at times on the stairs.

Your death rides a fast camel.

Mortality is one of the greatest gifts ever bestowed. After a long and fruitful life, we are able to rest.

You're mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.

Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.

I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and her book in my hands. Like a lot of things in my life, I'd just about worn it out, but it was worn out with love, and that's the best kind of worn-out there is. Maybe we're like all those used cars, broken hand tools, articles of old clothing, scratched record albums, and dog-eared books. Maybe there really isn't any such thing as mortality; that life simply wears us out with love.

I do not understand how you know you only have one life if you have never died, because if you have never died, then you cannot possibly know if you would go on living a second life, or go on living no more lives.

He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when.

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.

Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.

I don't think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is.

The end is never worth the beginning.

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.

If you don't make peace with your own mortality, you'll never know what it's like to truly be alive.