“You are mortal. You age, you die. If that is not hell, pray tell me, what is?”
Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes
Source: City of Ashes
Midnight Tides
“You are mortal. You age, you die. If that is not hell, pray tell me, what is?”
Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes
Source: City of Ashes
“Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal.”
Alexander the Great (-356–-323 BC) King of Macedon
As quoted in Alexander the Great (1973) by Robin Lane Fox
Unsourced variant : Only sex and sleep make me conscious that I am mortal.
“The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.”
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) author, critic and playwright from the United States
Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (6 April 1903)
“Oh me, I have been struck a mortal blow right inside.”
Source: Oresteia (458 BC), Agamemnon, line 1343
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author
Source: The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Stories
“My spirit is too weak — mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep”
John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet
"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" (1817)
Context: My spirit is too weak — mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
“Ploutos, no wonder mortals worship you:
You are so tolerant of their sins!”
Theognis of Megara (-570–-485 BC) Greek lyric poet active in approximately the sixth century BC
Source: Elegies, Lines 523-524, as translated by Dorothea Wender.