How to Use memento mori in a Sentence

memento mori

noun
Definition of memento morinext
  • The gash is like a memento mori, hidden, so his kids won’t see.
    — Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker, 8 Mar. 2021
  • Now, like memento mori, the lines on their brows add to the sense of inevitability that haunts the show.
    — Aaron Bady, The New Yorker, 18 Apr. 2022
  • Have fun, peace be with you, and, as always, memento mori.
    — Gabriella Paiella, The Cut, 7 May 2018
  • In the vein of the Dutch still life, the composition has its memento mori, here an hourglass.
    — Washington Post, 2 Nov. 2020
  • In Latin, memento mori is a phrase about the inevitability of death.
    — ELLE, 27 Jan. 2023
  • There’s no shortage of leering skulls; most are memento mori, but one is a parlor trick.
    — Cate McQuaid, BostonGlobe.com, 14 Mar. 2018
  • The purchase seemed darkly funny at the time, a memento mori of Trump-era parenting.
    — Lauren Mechling, WSJ, 18 June 2019
  • Vera’s very busy, very strange day, a day of confrontations, wily falsehoods and refusals, is a kind of memento mori.
    — Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 7 Sep. 2017
  • And her apartment is a daily memento mori, or at least a memory palace.
    — Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, 18 Sep. 2017
  • But the pandemic—that inescapable memento mori—serves as a frame and a catalyst rather than a subject.
    — Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine , 4 Jan. 2022
  • Some of its most fervent adherents collect the bones of small animals, as a form of memento mori.
    — Washington Post, 13 Sep. 2021
  • In this way and in others, the memento mori are clearly somewhat personal.
    — Carol Kino, WSJ, 6 Oct. 2017
  • Two of the figures are packed inside syringes to memorialize drug victims, while a toy-size cemetery with an open grave serves as a memento mori.
    — Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 14 Oct. 2022
  • During a family gathering there, one of the children finds a frightening memento mori: a skull wedged into the hollow of an old elm tree in the garden.
    — Tom Nolan, WSJ, 11 Oct. 2018
  • Some saints have been known especially for their devotion to the Latin phrase memento mori, remember your death.
    — Alexandra Desanctis, National Review, 2 Mar. 2022
  • Like the show as a whole, the work is an unsettling memento mori that invokes the conventions of art making only to radically upend them.
    — New York Times, 2 June 2021
  • The title alone offers a view of life as starkly unsentimental as any memento mori.
    — The New York Review of Books, 21 Feb. 2019
  • In medieval Europe, the skeleton was commonly portrayed as a memento mori—a reminder of the inevitability of death.
    — Chip Colwell, The Atlantic, 18 Oct. 2017
  • This memento mori is an intrusion of tragedy into an otherwise deathless space, but the ghost is also a hopeful sort of figure who somehow manages to elude oblivion.
    — Annika Neklason, The Atlantic, 26 June 2018
  • At its exit is a photograph from three decades later of another, crumpled pair of glistening red Adidas shorts: a drapery study, a memento mori.
    — Jason Farago, New York Times, 8 Sep. 2022
  • Shot in available light in a way that brings out the soft drifts of feathers and tender tufts of fur, the creatures seem halfway between death and life, reminiscent of medieval memento mori while also appearing strangely new.
    — Carol Kino, WSJ, 6 Oct. 2017
  • Fighting Demons, his second posthumous album is a tortured but overall grateful memento mori from a talented artist who left us all too soon.
    — Will Dukes, Rolling Stone, 16 Dec. 2021
  • Sister Aletheia’s project has reached Catholics all over the country, via social media, a memento mori prayer journal — even merchandise emblazoned with a signature skull.
    — New York Times, 14 May 2021
  • DeathLab has proposed suspending the glowing pods from the underside of the Manhattan Bridge, which would serve as a communal space for grief and a kind of geographic memento mori, much in the way a village churchyard once did.
    — Curbed, 6 May 2022
  • These are a different sort of memento mori: Plastic is cheap and perishable, yet at the molecular level nearly indestructible.
    — Washington Post, 8 Apr. 2022
  • Other takes on memento mori include Gregory Masurovsky’s lithograph that shows a cigarette burning itself out in an ashtray, with nothing in the background but endless gray.
    — Susan Dunne, courant.com, 29 July 2019
  • Pieces like the Chequers Ring are thematic siblings to the memento mori jewelry that was popular at the time, which often featured jeweled coffins, delicate gold skeletons, and other macabre bits of shiny symbolism.
    — Katy Kelleher, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020
  • Letting collections of things perpetuate in this way creates both a memento mori and a refusal of death’s power: American storage-renting is the opposite of Swedish death cleaning.
    — Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Harper’s Magazine , 7 Dec. 2021
  • The passage of time plays a key role in his sculptures; similar to works of memento mori popular in the 16th century that depicted skulls, hourglasses and decaying fruit, Swenson’s creatures are often struggling in death.
    — James Charisma, latimes.com, 4 June 2018
  • The boy king’s once triumphant riches now appeared tragic, his death mask a memento mori not only for individuals but for civilizations, which, no matter how powerful, seemed destined to fall.
    — Casey Cep, The New Yorker, 7 Feb. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'memento mori.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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