embrace of mortality Quotes

One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death.

In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today?

Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we'd find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.

But death doesn't scare me. To know exactly when I might expect it, up close and in my face, would actually be a comfort. Because to tell the truth, most of the time dying seems pretty much like my only means of escape.

If a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

There is no more desire to live past one's time than to die before it.

If you know how to live, even death is good news

You are the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death.

The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learnt to die has forgot to serve.

I know I'm gonna die so my revenge is living well.

Dying is like diving into a deep lake on a hot day. There's the shock of that sharp, cold change, the pain of it for a second, and then accepting is a swim in reality. But after so many times, even the shock wears off.

Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing

No art is possible without a dance with death.

The man who lives without conflict, who lives with beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to die.

I love Death because he breaks the human pattern and frees us from pleasures too prolonged as well as from the pains of this world. It is pleasant, too, to remember that Death lies in our hands; he must come if we call him. ... I think if there were no death, life would be more than flesh and blood could bear.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!

If one was to think constantly of death, the business of life would stand still

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

Sometimes the dying live more fiercely and wisely than the rest of us. (146)

Death should take me while I am in the mood.

One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it.

Some mortals--like you--are already half in love with death. It is who you are, and I'll not make it harder on you by telling you things you don't need to know. Ask me again when you die. Then I'll tell you everything, anything, nothing.