mortality

Bugle"Black beetles know where the most recent bonesbake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone, bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine --drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone--they will lead you to a barren gulchsurrounded by sages and nettles, dirtburnt to powdery sand and sharp thorns. Hunchabove the skeleton, bow your head, start reciting verses you learned as a child, there, under the sun with rocks and brush, bare locust tree a telling reliquary of dust to dust, all so brutally hot. You must pull ribs from that rotting body,words that matter: love me, love me not.

Life is only precious because it ends, kid.

Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today _ it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.

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.

We reach the end of our lives long before we reach the end of ourselves.

the unconscious is so seductive because mortality is alien to it

Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. But he who garners day by day the good life, he is happiest.

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one__ very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

Ignorance of mortality is a comfort.

But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

Hawks with broken wings; lions with broken paws; men with broken hearts, they all have one thing in common: they're all as sure to die as those unbroken.

Me, I'm living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino's disease, which could lay me in the grave most anytime. Not that I mind too much; I've done everything I ever wanted to do. But ... as you know, one would like to continue doing the good things over and over again, so long as there's pleasure in it.

It isn't about being fair and equal. It's about the difference between right and wrong." He stared out at the bloody Elinarch. "And this was wrong.

In the end, the body betrayed everyone.

The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth

That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust.

This is to be mortal, And seek the things beyond mortality.

No one, in the end, made it out of this life alive.