Cate Blanchett Quotes

Mortality applies to every aspect of life. The fear of death is the driving fear of life.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal.

It doesn't take that many years for a kid to realise that they're going to die. It's always there in the back of their mind the rest of their lives.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

As a culture, we are not comfortable with mortality. We do not accept it the way other cultures do. We cling to youth, and we don't want to die. It's like, 'Well, too bad, we do.'

Ever since childhood, when I found out that the ultimate fate for all humans was death, sheer terror and morbid curiosity had been fighting for supremacy in my mind.

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

The subject of death is taboo. We feel, perhaps only subconsciously, that to be in contact with death in any way, even indirectly, somehow confronts us with the prospect of our own deaths, draws our own deaths closer and makes them more real and thinkable.

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

It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of them. I'm not a big fan of talking about dying.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

I don't think kids have a problem with death. It's us older ones who are nearer to it, that start being frightened.

I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.

I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is in danger of dying, I'm not interested,' but of course I'm not really joking.

We're the only species that can look into the future and know that we're going to die one day, and it causes all sorts of cognitive stress on your system.

Why should I be worried about dying? It's not going to happen in my lifetime!

Lots of people there seemed to be in denial, in absolute denial, of death - everybody's pretending that death doesn't happen in L.A.; if you do enough exercise and take enough wheatgrass and have your pill every day, you might not die.

I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.

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

There is something about this generation living now, that we don't accept death.

Of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face - to worry about how to die - distinguishes us from other animals. The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.

Since I was a child, death is definitely something that I think about every day. But I think that everybody does. You try and avoid it, but it's such a big thing that you can't.

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 was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

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