For years I've been hearing 20-somethings say they don't expect Social Security to be around when they hit 65. Eventually, I came to realize that they really mean that they just don't expect to be 65. Or 40. Neither did I, when I was 22.
My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.
I don't believe in dying. It's been done. I'm working on a new exit. Besides, I can't die now - I'm booked.
I've always been into self-dramatization. I intend to live forever.
Hamlet and Victor Frankenstein are each obsessed with death. Hamlet's whole story is a philosophical preparation for death; Victor's is an intellectual refusal to accept it.
Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.
Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.
It is seldom men think of death in the pride of their health and strength.
... there is a skeleton (or death) that flees terrified in the face of my will to live.
We are so afraid of the idea of having to die... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn.
Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.
[We assume] that the self is an actual living thing, but it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death.
What is wrong with us human beings, and has been wrong since time immemorial, is that without ever stating it in so many words, we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality. We behave as if we are never going to die - an infantile arrogance. But even more injurious than this sense of immortality is what comes with it : the sense that we can engulf this inconcievable universe with our minds.
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.
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.
God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.
We live on the cusp of death Thinking it won't be us
There is nothing ugly about death; but man, out of his fear, has made even the word, death ugly and unutterable. People don't like to talk about it. They won't even listen to the word death.
You would think death was an optional extra nowadays. Nobody wants to tick that box.
In a way I'm probably immortal.
The conceit of an anchorman is we never think we're going to die, I suppose.
You believe that you're going to be forever young.
Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive -- a peculiar form of denial of our mortality?
We each cope differently with the specter of our deaths. Some people deny it. Some pray. Some numb themselves with tequila. I was tempted to do a little of each of those things. But I think we are supposed to try to face it straightforwardly, armed with nothing but courage.
When you see magazine articles and you go, 'Oh my God, that one looks so old or look how fat someone is' it has very little to do with the person in question and more to do with the person who's asking the question. People don't want to believe their own mortality.
