Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

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.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

We're all dying. We're all in the process of oxidizing. Everyone of us is in the process of oxidizing, so to sort of interrupt one aspect of that while everything else goes on, it's a freak show.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

The brief span of our poor unhappy life to its final hour Is hastening on; and while we drink and call for gay wreaths, Perfumes, and young girls, old age creeps upon us, unperceived.

song of elli (old age) "What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain What is gone is gone... What is sea-born dies on land, Soft is trod upon. What is given burns the hand - What is gone is gone... Here is there, and high is low; All may be undone. What is true, no two men know - What is gone is gone... Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose - What is gone is gone.

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us.

What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish.

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

The fascinating thing about human beings is that they don't last, and everything eventuates, and everything is very, very brief. And even if you do manage to look reasonably well as you age, unfortunately you are attacked at every level by illness and so forth. It's a fact of life.

Death, like the sun, cannot be looked at steadily.

Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.

We are buried when we're born. The world is a place of graves occupied and graves potential. Life is what happens while we wait for our appointment with the mortician.

Death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

The first thing you have to do is accept that decay sets in and there's nothing you can do about it.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

There is no more final end than death.

Whether people be of high or low birth, rich or poor, old or young, enlightened or confused, they are all alike in that they will one day die.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.

I don't expect anything from anybody. When you grow old... Your days are gone; it is part of life.