"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
— Albert Camus

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)

"I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"The curse of mortality. You spend the first portion of your life learning, growing stronger, more capable. And then, through no fault of your own, your body begins to fail. You regress. Strong limbs become feeble, keen senses grow dull, hardy constitutions deteriorate. Beauty withers. Organs quit. You remember yourself in your prime, and wonder where that person went. As your wisdom and experience are peaking, your traitorous body becomes a prison."
— Brandon Mull (Fablehaven)

"I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure."
— George Gordon Byron

"Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal..."
— Bertrand Russell

"It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us."
— Ian McEwan (Black Dogs)

"Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men do not.
The essentials of the dead man's life--
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight--
will abide forever.
Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue
when it is the lives of others that will make that happen,
as you yourself are the mirror and image
of those who did not live as long as you
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth."
— Jorge Luis Borges (Selected Poems)

"The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"One does not fear death itself, but rather the realization of their own mortality"
— Joy Stroube

"Yet at the last Beren was slain by the Wolf that came from the gates of Angband, and he died in the arms of Tinúviel. But she chose mortality, and to die from the world, so that she might follow him; and it is sung that they met again beyond the Sundering Seas, and after a brief time walking alive once more in the green woods, together they passed, long ago, beyond the confines of this world. So it is that Lúthien Tinúviel alone of the Elf-kindred has died indeed and left the world, and they have lost her whom they most loved."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems...
How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon?...Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true--anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other--beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn't, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone."
— James Baldwin (Just Above My Head)

"Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight."
— Gene Wolfe (Latro in the Mist)

"We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try."
— Ekaterina Sedia (The Alchemy Of Stone)

"Death is always on its way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t, we get to think of life as inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really."
— Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)

"Thou knewst the wondrous art,
And order of each part
In the whole lump, how every sense
Contributes to the health's defense
The severall Channells which convey,
The vitall current every way,
Tracks wise Nature everywhere,
In every region, every sphere,
Fathomest the mistery
Of deepe Anatomy.
The unactive carcasse thou hadst preyd upon,
And stript it to a skeleton,
But now alas! The art is gone,
And now on thee
The Crawling Worms experience their Anatomy.

eulogy of Thomas Willis (1621-1675) by Nathaniel Williams

Note: A strange immortality has been achieved by discoverers of various parts and mechanisms of the human body. Consider the Golgi apparatus or the Canals of Schlemm, for example. These names charmed me in anatomy class and I've been desultorily researching the biographies of their discoverers, which has led to an interesting title to include on my to-read list, The Soul Made Flesh "
— Nathaniel Williams

"There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace."
— Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White)

"Time deals gently only with those who take it gently."
— Anatole France (The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard)

"It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish."
— Jules Renard