Memento Mori

It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.

If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is not another practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

Final perseverance is the doctrine that wins the eternal victory in small things as in great

Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practise which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

Her words depressed him. They were like spilt sugar; however much you swept it up some grains would keep grinding under your feet.

There was altogether too much candor in married life; it was an indelicate modern idea, and frequently led to upsets in a household, if not divorce...

If you don’t remember Death, Death reminds you to do so. And if you can’t cope with the facts the next best thing is to go away for a holiday.

Godfrey's wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology.

For my part,' said Miss Taylor, 'I would be glad to be let die in peace. But the doctors would be horrified to hear me say it. They are so proud of their new drugs and new methods of treatment - there is always something new. I sometimes fear, at the present rate of discovery, I shall never die.

She possessed a strong faculty for simply refusing to admit an unpleasant situation, and going quite blank where it was concerned. If, for instance, you had asked her whether, eighteen years before, she had undergone a face-lifting operation, she would have denied it, and believed the denial, and moreover would have supplied gratuitously, as a special joke, a list of people who had 'really' had their faces lifted or undergone other rejuvenating operations.

We all appear to ourselves frustrated in our old age...because we cling to everything so much. But in reality we are still fulfilling our lives.

How primitive, Guy thought, life becomes in old age, when one may be surrounded by familiar comforts and yet more vulnerable to the action of nature than any young explorer at the Pole. And how simply the physical laws assert themselves, frustrating all one's purposes.