#mortality

We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, lesser species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselve preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know we lived. ↗

— Michelle Richmond

#death

I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#death #generations #mortality #time #death

Well, if you don't want your relatives and friends to die, help me spread the news. Let people know about immortality device. That way, your loved ones won't die. ↗

— Alex Chiu

#device #die #friends #help #immortality

I don't want to achieve immortality by being inducted into the Hall of Fame. I want to achieve immortality by not dying. ↗

— William De Morgan

#being #dying #fame #hall #i

We must start with the reality that corporations cannot guarantee anyone a lifetime job any more than corporations have a guarantee of immortality. ↗

— John W. Snow

#anyone #cannot #corporations #guarantee #immortality

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#freezing #melt #moment #mortality #mutability

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. ↗

— George Santayana

#endow #experience #immortality #lend #memory

The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it. ↗

— Blaise Pascal

#consequence #feeling #great #immortality #indifferent

Dès que Séraphine l'a laissé seul, Gontran se jette à genoux au pied du lit ; il enfonce son front dans les draps, mais ne parvient pas à pleurer ; aucun élan ne soulève son cœur. Ses yeux désespérément restent secs. Alors il se relève. Il regarde ce visage impassible. Il voudrait, en ce moment solennel, éprouver je ne sais quoi de sublime et de rare, écouter une communication de l'au-delà, lancer sa pensée dans des régions éthérées,suprasensibles - mais elle reste accrochée, sa pensée, au ras du sol. Il regarde les mains exsangues du mort, et se demande combien de temps encore les ongles continueront de pousser. ↗

— André Gide

#communication

Memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand--evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil shall I do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes. ↗

— H. Rider Haggard

#living #living-on #sorrow #waiting #age