Roger Zelazny Quotes

I feel about aging the way William Saroyan said he felt about death: Everybody has to do it, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case.

Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.

I don't have a fear of aging or a fear of death.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

I would hate to be immortal forever.

Once, I went speeding past an old couple and smiled as I imagined their conversation: him grumbling about me and her telling him not to be such an old grouch. Then, suddenly I was in tears, thinking, 'I'll never get to be a grumpy old grandpa!'

Don't get old, if you can avoid it.

All of us have the same thing coming - death. It's waiting. But I don't want to go. I want to live to be 102!

I want to live until they find a cure for dying.

I don't think it is about stalling or curing: it's about reversing. Curing gives you the impression of immortality. Stalling gives you the impression that you'll be 85 forever, which is not great.

If I give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods, I can add ten years to my life. Trouble is, I'll add it to the wrong end.

Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.

But years hath done this wrong, To make me write too much, and live too long.

Do not believe yourself healthy. Immortality is health; this life is a long sickness.

There are many things in this world that are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn’t strike me as one of them. Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.

You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

My God, I'm four hundred years old and the most I can do is look three hundred.

Five years off my life... I wondered with a wry smile, would people be immortal if they didn't have kids?

All would live long, but none would be old.

a little bird moves a mountain of sand one grain at a time it picks up one grain every million years and when the mountain has been moved the bird puts it all back again and that's how long eternity is and that's a very long time to be dead

Is that a birthday? 'tis, alas! too clear; 'Tis but the funeral of the former year.

But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills, And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me, And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes. - Tithonus

Only the dead stay seventeen forever.

I've never made love to a ghost but I have made love to men who are a few years away from becoming a ghost.