Mary Doria Russell Quotes

Life is an incurable disease.

This is the danger of loving: No matter how powerful you are, no matter how many kingdoms you rule, you cannot stop those you love from dying.

For some reason focusing on destruction and mortality is more poetically exciting to me than hope and love.

Love, sex, food, friendship, art, play, beauty and the simple pleasure of a cup of tea are all well and good, but never forget that God/the universe is determined to kill you by whatever means necessary.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Being dead is being weak and walled off.

To have died once is enough.

The moment you're born you're done for.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

I may have won the only important lotto ever, which is life, but I am still going to die. We all are.

Life and death are matters of the God. I can be killed even at home.

What, then, remains but that we still should cry, For being born, and, being born, to die?

No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful.

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

Let this be my final lesson. Everyone and everything has a time to die.

You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.

How odd to watch a mortal kindle / Then to dwindle day by day / Knowing their bright souls are tinder / And the wind will have its way

A short death is the sovereign good hap of human life.

No one survives life.

Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.

Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.