Life & Mortality Quote by Bryant H. McGill

McGill’s line lands because it refuses the comforting myth that we’re ever fully in charge of the big plot points. “Birth and death” are framed like bookends, but he immediately undercuts the neatness: they’re not milestones we understand, they’re “two unknowns.” That phrase is doing most of the work. It doesn’t romanticize mystery; it makes uncertainty the default setting of being alive.

The intent feels less philosophical flex than practical recalibration. McGill, a contemporary self-help adjacent writer, trades in aphorisms meant to travel: short, portable, quotable enough for a caption, but broad enough to meet readers wherever they are. The subtext is a gentle demotion of ego. If the beginning and end are opaque, then the middle is not a proving ground for certainty; it’s a corridor where control is partial, plans are provisional, and everyone is improvising.

The grammar quietly democratizes the message. “We all move” collapses status, achievement, and identity into a shared condition: motion between unknowables. “Move” suggests passage rather than conquest; it’s not “build” or “win” or “become.” That choice makes the line resonate in a culture trained to treat life as a project with measurable outputs. It also nods to a modern secular mood: fewer people lean on fixed metaphysical answers, so the honest stance is humility, not doctrine.

In context, it’s a permission slip: stop demanding that life resolve into certainty, and start paying attention to what you do with the stretch of light between two doors you didn’t choose and can’t see through.