Joseph Heller Quotes

If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease. . . Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.

To my mind, there are two things that, in life, you can do about death. Either you can choose to ignore it, in which case you may have some success in making the idea of it go away for a limited period of time, or you can confront the prospect of your own death and try to analyze it and, in so doing, try to minimize some of the inevitable suffering that it causes. Neither way can you actually overcome it.

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

Death must be got through as life had been, just somehow.

Imagine somebody says you are going to die in a few weeks; I'd really rather not know.

I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

We're so terrified of death in Western culture that we have to make up a myth of an afterlife. I think there's something to be said for living your life very mindful of the fact that you're going to die because I think you carry yourself differently. It doesn't have to be this big, negative bummer.

I've worked very hard to become comfortable with how death works and why it happens. I now know that death isn't out to get me.

No doubt many people have the feeling that to talk about death at all is, in effect, to conjure it up mentally, to bring it closer in such a way that one has to face up to the inevitability of one's own eventual demise. So, to spare ourselves this psychological trauma, we decide just to try to avoid the topic as much as possible.

I feel like I don't watch that many shows with death.

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.

People assume that death hanging over my head would allow me to put things into perspective, but that's not how it works.

There is a way that a younger person can accept the inevitable problem that they're going to die, whereas somebody a little bit older might be overcome.

We have a lot of fear around death, and I thought maybe I can help somebody... I want people to be less scared.

I think of dying every day... At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.

I've become pretty philosophical about a lot of things, including death. It doesn't get to me.

Death is something that I am still trying to figure out a healthy relationship with.

There's no point thinking about dying, because it's going to happen anyway, isn't it? I don't waste my time worrying about that.

There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

I don't mind dying... as long as I don't have to be there when it happens.

I don't think I've ever been particularly scared of death - but scared of dying, the process. It doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.

We do not know whether it is good to live or to die. Therefore, we should not take delight in living, nor should we tremble at the thought of death. We should be equiminded towards death. This is the ideal. It may be long before we reach it, and only a few of us can attain it. Even then, we must keep it constantly in view, and the more difficult it seems of attainment, the greater should be the effort we put forth.