#mortality

Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time, with a gift of tears; Grief, with a glass that ran; Pleasure, with pain for leaven; Summer, with flowers that fell; Remembrance, fallen from heaven, And madness risen from hell; Strength without hands to smite; Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light, And Life, the shadow of death. ↗

— Algernon Charles Swinburne

#grief #life #love #madness #mortality

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fathers #mortality #sons #writers #death

Idag samlar vi skor och bilar, igår flintyxor. Utan tvivel har arkeologer funnit betydligt fler flintyxor än vad människan rimligtvis behövde. Jag tror att flintyxorna handlar om en längtan, kanske en rädsla. Om jag bara har tillräckligt många flintyxor, eller skor, eller ett nyrenoverat kök så kan inget ont hända. Det är den där dödsångesten igen. Den otäcka insikten att allt, allt, allt är förgängligt. Jag kommer att dö, men mina flintyxor kommer att finnas kvar. (Och de fanns ju kvar, eller hur? Men vad hjälper det?) ↗

— Ann Heberlein

#death #mortality #death

Often, on the brink of finding the recipe for immortality, I get distracted by the frightful presence of death. ↗

— Héctor Abad Faciolince

#fear #immortality #recipes #death

In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#immortality #life-after-death #the-pit-and-the-pendulum #death

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? ↗

— William Wordsworth

#dreams

The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal. ↗

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

#immortality #inspirational #inspirational

(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality") ↗

— Maurice Maeterlinck

#immortality #madness #intelligence

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity. ↗

— Iris Murdoch

#mortality #life

Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity. ↗

— Margaret George

#mortality #time #life