Henry David Thoreau Quotes

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.

You've got to learn to accept the law of life, and face the fact that we disintegrate slowly.

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 think we all lose in the end because we don't get to stay here forever.

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.

All who are born are always dying.

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.

All things must pass.

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

Day buries day; month, month; and year the year: Our life is but a chain of many deaths.

Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

First our pleasures die - and then our hopes, and then our fears - and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust - and we die too.

I don't think of death in a romantic way anymore.

Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

All things are only transitory.

I like things that are just about to go. Everything's leaving. Death is never far away from me. When you make something, death can't help but be in it.

They say the death of a parent puts you in time because that means there's now no generation standing between you and ordinary death: you're next. I don't buy it.

I love things on the decline because that's really the natural progression of our lives. We're born, we're feisty for the first couple of years, and then the inevitable decline begins.

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.