coming to terms with mortality Quotes

Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing.

To one bent on age, death will come as a release. I feel this quite strongly now that I have grown old myself and have come to regard death like an old debt, at long last to be discharged.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

At fifty you realize that you are no longer a kid. I ignored forty. It was like I was almost at middle age. Maybe it's the baby boomer thing. But undeniably, I am a man. I have to accept [mortality].

How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?" he asked. He waited a few minutes, but the three of us didn't say anything. He continued: "Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am.

You have to give up! you have to give up! You have to realize that someday you will die, Until you know that, you are useless!

A man must be prepared to face life, as well as death, there's no escape from either.

The great comfort of turning forty-nine is the realization that you are now too old to die young.

It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.

There is a thing called the death wish, a literal thing. It doesn't mean you want to die. It just means however we're built, as we get into these years, some inner part of you does begin to accept the fact that you're heading towards the end, and there's a peace that comes with that.

One day I will have to forgive life for ending, I tell myself. I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality ... just be what it is.

Death is a part of life, and eventually I assimilated that completely.

I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.

One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die ...and accepts his sentence undismayed.

Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.