Octavio Paz Quotes

Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.

It must be understood that, as adults, we are all terminal.

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

People are so damned afraid that one day they might wake up and discover that they've grown old.

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

I was fascinated by mortality. Most people are, even if they don't admit it.

The minute you're born, you're getting older.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.

When we look on the roses and gaiety of youth, the mournful idea of mortality is altogether alien to our thoughts. We have heard of it as a speculation and a tale, but nothing but experience can bring it home to us.

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.

What is life about? Two things: love and death.

When we are no longer children, we are already dead.

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

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

A person is a process, one that leads to death.

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.

Life is the longest death in California.

Most men are essentially dead by thirty.

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.

We've spent the last few millennia aware that senescence is horrible but knowing nevertheless that it's inevitable. We've had to find some mechanism to put it out of our minds so we can get on with our miserably short lives.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

You realize mortality is everywhere.