Neal Stephenson Quotes

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

When you've been in life-threatening situations, you become aware that life is not for ever.

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

An insatiable appetite for glory leads to sacrifice and death, but innate instinct leads to self-preservation and life.

We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.

I think that laughter and death are closely related: comedy is the quintessential human reaction to the fear of death. It's probably linked with the fact that we are the only animals who know we must die.

Horror, almost better than any of the other genres, pits the will to live against the will toward nihilism. I just think that's worth exploring. I don't know what is more important, actually, to explore than that very dynamic.

I think it is impossible for human minds to think of Death as a final, irrevocable end to life.

Nothing is so important to man as his own state; nothing is so formidable to him as eternity. And thus it is unnatural that thereshould be men indifferent to the loss of their existence and to the perils of everlasting suffering.

We are all mortals, and each is for himself.

I was thinking Im going to die but I'm not going to tap

All I did was die,' I said. 'And then, when presented with an opportunity not to be dead any more, I took it. Anyone else would have done the same thing.

Even if they don't know it, everyone has the instinct to survive.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

The instinct of self-preservation in human society, acting almost subconsciously, as do all drives in the human mind, is rebelling against the constantly refined methods of annihilation and against the destruction of humanity.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

If you play dead often enough, you've got a great will to live.

Self-preservation, nature's first great law, all the creatures, except man, doth awe.

What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.

Death is a false fear. When it is here, you won't be. When it's not, you are here.

Nothing is more dreadful in life than the profound thought that death may only greet you with eternal nothingness.

It is inconceivable for our unconscious to imagine an actual ending of our own life here on Earth, and if this life of ours has to end, the ending is always attributed to a malicious intervention from the outside by someone else.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual's way of being in the world.