Nora Ephron Quotes

I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.

Once in a while, when I'm alone, I think about my age. I think, How many more years do I have on this earth? But I can't really conceive of dying. Somehow, in my head, I don't think I'll die. I know that everybody dies, of course. I just think that it'll never come to me. It's crazy, but there it is.

Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it.... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you.

Usually the threat of death makes people a lot more aware of their lives.

I always thought that as long as man is mortal, he will never be relaxed.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.

If people are not afraid of dying, why threaten them with death?

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.

Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco.

A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.

Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.

I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?

We're just animals, creatures smart enough and unlucky enough to have figured out we're alive, and we're going to die without ever knowing any purpose. We can pretend all we want and we can wish all we want, but that basic existential fact remains—we can't know.

Do you think that people ever really do believe they will die, that the world will just go along as always without them? I wonder if we aren't all a little surprised at the moment of crossover, if we don't look back over our shoulders saying, Now hold on.

It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it.

I used to think the only way to be truly alive is to confront your mortality.

Just looking at all the faces here reminds me of some of the great work that was done this year . . . by cosmetic surgeons.

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

People are afraid to die, and even more afraid to live.

Honestly, depending on what stage I'm at in my life, my opinion on plastic surgery changes. I've never been against plastic surgery - I'm against bad plastic surgery. I'm against the overuse of plastic surgery.

[On plastic surgery:] My motto is: 'Anything that can be lifted should be lifted. Anything that falls should be caught. And try to catch any falling stuff before it hits the ground.

age is nothing but death that is conscious.