Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes

Death, thou art infinite; it is life is little.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

Life, the permission to know death.

You realize mortality is everywhere.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

Remember that life is short and death is long.

I'm writing this book because we're all going to die.

Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.

Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.

Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.

My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves!

But we are not interested in death at all: rather, we escape the facts, we are continuously escaping the facts. Death is there, and every moment we are dying. Death is not something far away, it is here and now: we are dying. But while we are dying we go on being concerned about life. This concern with life, this over concern with life, is just an escape, just a fear. Death is there, deep inside - growing.

My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.

Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that there is such a thing as death.

Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.

All of us have been dying, hour by hour, since the moment we were born. Realizing this, let all things be placed in their proper perspective. . . . Remember, it is always later than you think.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after - lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.

A lot of my songs are about death and the fleetingness of life. It just feels good to remind myself about that a lot. For whatever reason. And it's a beautiful thing, actually. It seems to me like it's a beautiful way to live in the world and to relate to things, with an awareness of temporality.

In the midst of life, we are in death.