Mortality Quotes - Page 6

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.

  Neil Gaiman

  Brother, Pain, Men

  Neil Gaiman (2005). “Anansi Boys”

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• Peter Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary, they were for the taking.

  Mark Helprin

  Love, Laughter, Lakes

  Mark Helprin (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.151, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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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• We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.

  Ronald Dworkin

  Writing, Tiny, Sand

  Ronald Dworkin (2011). “Justice for Hedgehogs”, p.437, Harvard University Press

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• No might nor greatness in mortality Can censure 'scape; back- wounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?

  William Shakespeare

  Strong, Kings, Greatness

  William Shakespeare, N. W. Bawcutt (1998). “Measure for Measure”, p.172, Oxford University Press, USA

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• It is the abiding faith of mortals that mortality is a temporary condition.

  Robert Breault

  Abiding Faith, Immortality, Conditions

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• Child of mortality, whence comest thou? Why is thy countenance sad, and why are thine eyes red with weeping?

  Anna Letitia Barbauld

  Children, Eye, Red

  Anna Letitia Barbauld (2001). “Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.257, Broadview Press

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• Sister, look ye, How, by a new creation of my tailor's I've shook off old mortality.

  John Ford

  Looks, Tailors, Creation

  John Ford (1811). “The Dramatic Works of John Ford”, p.134

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• Clean water is a necessity that we can no longer take for granted. Each year more people die of water related diseases than any other cause of death on this planet. With a higher rate of suffering and mortality than diabetes, cancer, high cholesterol, or war; or any two combined for that matter! An entire economy is growing around water. Those without money are suffering the most and risk severe illness from contaminated sources

  Jewel

  Cancer, War, Years

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• Enlightenment means that you're in love with all of life, with not only immortality but mortality.

  Frederick Lenz

  Mean, Enlightenment, Immortality

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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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• If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal.

  Frank Herbert

  Want, Immortality, Deny

  Frank Herbert (2008). “God Emperor of Dune”, p.377, Penguin

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• Christlike communications will help us to develop righteous relationships and ultimately to return to our heavenly home safely. May we treasure the divine gift of communication, and may we use it wisely to build and to assist others on this marvelous journey through mortality.

  L. Lionel Kendrick

  Communication, Home, Journey

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• Ye who amid this feverish world would wear A body free of pain, of cares a mind, Fly the rank city, shun its turbid air; Breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke And volatile corruption, from the dead, The dying, sickening, and the living world Exhal'd, to sully heaven's transparent dome With dim mortality.

  John Armstrong

  Pain, Air, Cities

  John Armstrong, Samuel Johnson (1822). “The Poems of Armstrong and Johnson”, p.25

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• Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore, Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable sea?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Ocean, Years, Sea

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.292

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• I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of "privileged despair."

  Kenneth Tynan

  Indulge In, Luxury, Despair

  "Conference at Edinburgh (1963)". "Tynan Right and Left: Plays, Films, People, Places and Events". Book by Kenneth Tynan, p. 146, 1967.

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• No slave system has ever been able to continue to function on the slaves provided by its own biological reproduction because the rate of human reproduction is too slow and the expense from infant mortality and years of unproductive upkeep of the young make this prohibitively expensive. This relationship is one of the basic causes of the American Civil War, and was even more significant in destroying ancient Rome.

  Carroll Quigley

  War, Years, Rome

  Carroll Quigley (1979). “The evolution of civilizations: an introduction to historical analysis”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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• The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking--but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Meaningful, Past, Reality

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• We are power. But these are only words if you don't have the personal power to unlock the gates of immortality and of mortality.

  Frederick Lenz

  Power, Immortality, Gates

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