Mortality Quotes - Page 5

• Death and pain dominate this world, for though many are cured, they leave still weak, still tremulous, still knowing mortality has whispered to them; have seen in the folding of white bedspreads according to rule the starched pleats of a shroud.

  Denise Levertov

  Pain, White, Knowing

  1972 Footprints,'The Malice of Innocence'.

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• We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.

  Paul Auster

  Fate, Men, Long

  Paul Auster (2012). “Winter Journal”, p.182, Macmillan

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• Obedience to the law of chastity will increase our happiness in mortality and make possible our progress in eternity.

  David A. Bednar

  Law, Progress, Eternity

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• My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I wasn't sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.

  William J. Clinton

  Memories, Father, Should Have

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• We do not take much warning of our own mortality in seeing others die, nor of our own weakness in seeing others break down: we think we feel the springs of life stronger in us.

  Julia McNair Wright

  Spring, Thinking, Stronger

  Julia McNair Wright (1879). “The Complete Home: an Encyclopædia of Domestic Life and Affairs: The Household in Its Foundation, Order, Economy ... A Volume of Practical Experiences Popularly Illustrated”

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• Many of us will not survive our tests in mortality without help from others. And just as true: in helping others we keep our own spirits alive.

  Kathleen H. Hughes

  Helping Others, Alive, Tests

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• The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it.

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Children, Unique, Expectations

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• The truth is women use contraception not only as a way to prevent unintended pregnancies, but also to improve their health and the health of their families. Increased access to contraception is directly linked to declines in maternal and infant mortality.

  Felicity Huffman

  Pregnancy, Use, Way

  "Don't threaten women's health care" By Felicity Huffman, www.cnn.com. February 29, 2012.

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• As indicated by the increase in maternal mortality in 2010, right now it's more dangerous to give birth in California than in Kuwait or Bosnia. Amnesty International reports that women in [the United States] have a higher risk of dying due to pregnancy complications than women in forty-nine other countries (black women are almost four times as likely to die as white women). The United States spends more than any other country on maternal health care, yet our risk of dying or coming close to death during pregnancy or in childbirth remains unreasonably high.

  Jessica Valenti

  Country, Pregnancy, White

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• Vampires Are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side,” is now out! Quote: “Vampires let us play with death and the issue of mortality. They let us ponder what it would mean to be truly long lived. Would the long view allow us to see the world differently, imagine social structures differently? Would it increase or decrease our reverence for the planet? Vampires allow us to ask questions we usually bury.

  Margot Adler

  Mean, Dark, Views

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• Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die.

  Jacques Derrida

  Plato, Philosophical, Mean

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• The U.S. routinely ranks lower than other countries in health outcomes such as infant mortality.

  Tammy Baldwin

  Country, Outcomes, Infant

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• The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)

  E. B. White

  New York, Islands, Years

  Here Is New York (1949)

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• She dealt her pretty words like Blades -- How glittering they shone -- And every One unbared a Nerve Or wantoned with a Bone -- She never deemed -- she hurt -- That -- is not Steel's Affair -- A vulgar grimace in the Flesh -- How ill the Creatures bear -- To Ache is human -- not polite -- The Film upon the eye Mortality's old Custom -- Just locking up -- to Die.

  Emily Dickinson

  Hurt, Eye, Steel

  Emily Dickinson (2012). “Emily Dickinson: Everyman's Poetry”, p.83, Hachette UK

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• Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be Defence enough against Mortality

  Aphra Behn

  Lying, Enough, Proof

  Aphra Behn (2014). “The Rover: Revised edition”, p.11, A&C Black

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• Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

  Margaret Atwood

  Writing, Desire, Fascination

  Margaret Atwood (2002). “Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing”, p.156, Cambridge University Press

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• If you have had no tension in your life, never been screwed up by problems, your mortality well within your own grasp, and someone tells you that God so loved you that He gave His Son to die for you, nothing but good manners will keep you from being amused.

  Oswald Chambers

  Son, Good Man, Problem

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• The life of an aviator seemed to me ideal. It involved skill. It brought adventure. It made use of the latest developments of science. Mechanical engineers were fettered to factories and drafting boards while pilots have the freedom of wind with the expanse of sky. There were times in an aeroplane when it seemed I had escaped mortality to look down on earth like a God.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Adventure, Wind, Sky

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• You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.

  Anne Carson

  Doubt, Credit, Divine

  Anne Carson (1999). “Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse”, Vintage

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• The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache. This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Depression, Roots, World

  Interview with Eric Nordern, Playboy, September 1968.

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• I think at the prospect of bringing children into the world, your mortality comes very much to the forefront, absolutely.

  Cate Blanchett

  Children, Thinking, World

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• ... social environment in childhood affects achieved adult height, life chances, and ultimately mortality rates in adult life. (...) ... social circumstances acting in childhood do have a persisting effect on adult disease rates, in addition to influences acting in adulthood.

  Michael Marmot

  Health, Childhood, Acting

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• General improvements in health/decline in mortality do not affect all classes equally. As mortality rates fall, social inequalities commonly widen.

  Michael Marmot

  Fall, Health, Class

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• When you're a kid, you have this feeling like you're indestructible. Your mortality doesn't even occur to you. But as time goes by, you realize, "I better cut this out or that out if I want to continue to exist."

  David Johansen

  Kids, Cutting, Feelings

  "Sex, Drugs, and Drag". Interview with Eric Spitznagel, www.vanityfair.com. March 3, 2011.

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• Now, more than ever, we need people in space... The events of September 11 show us how vulnerable we and our civilization are down here on Earth... So let us use our strength, our awareness of mortality as a civilization, to do something truly lasting and earth-shaking for humanity. Let us join with the peoples and cultures of this planet, the diversities of its perspectives and religions and science, so we can leave it-not behind, but as a springboard to something better.

  Paul Levinson

  Space, Civilization, Perspective

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