John Hodgman Quotes

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.

I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.

You get to a certain point in your life where you get closer to the end of your life than the beginning, and it colors your life, in a way.

I'm happier because I had to face what all of us try not to face: that we're going to die. It's a fact.

In your twenties, you think you are immortal. In your thirties, you hope you are immortal.

A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it... I don't know, 20 times a day.

The big change is the proximity to death.

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

As one gets older, this question of death, becomes more vexing and urgent.

I suppose you do think about the time that's allotted to you more than when you were younger. The mortality thing obviously has a stronger pull for you. It's an imminent truth; it's not necessarily a bad thing. You realize - much earlier than my age now - that you won't be able to play for England's football team, just to take a really crass example. So you can't have that life again. Unless you believe in reincarnation or whatever. Reincarnation? That's a whole other question. I find people who talk about that sort of thing in interviews idiotic. And I don't want to go down with them.

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.

Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.

I definitely think about death. And every day your relationship with death changes. And every day I sort of feel like I know it more. I've always thought about it.

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.

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

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.

The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.

Man is unique in that, unlike animals, he knows he is going to die, and unlike animals he can do something about it.

the encounter with death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on.

As we grow old, we become aware that death is drawing near; his shadow falls across our path; the realities of life seem less crude than of yore, they touch our senses less intimately, and they lose much of their poignancy.

We are wrong in looking forward to death: in great measure it's past already.

To be cliché, death is a part of life and it's going to happen to all of us. I have the blessing of getting a little bit of advance notice and I am able to optimize my use of time down the home stretch.

In your teens and twenties, death doesn't exist. In your thirties, you glance down the road occasionally. But then in your forties, it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

If you are fully alive to the prospect of dying, you really start reprioritising your life.

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.