Quotes
People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought-experiment. At the camp fire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.
Yet saw he something in the lives
Of those who'd ceased to live
That rounded them with majesty
Which living failed to give.
In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence. (pp. 316-317)
"Seems to me...seems to me...look, death must be going on, right? Death has to happen. That's what bein' alive is all about. You're alive, and then you're dead. It can't just stop happening." (p. 43)
In a general sort of way everyone knew they were going to die, even the common people. No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched. (pp. 11-12)
He said that there was death and taxes, and taxes was worse, because at least death didn't happen to you every year. (p. 182)
It was, as he was wonderfully well placed to know, merely putting off the inevitable. But wasn't that what living was all about? (p. 277)
To the axeman, all supplicants are the same height. (p. 5)
It was dawning on him that the pleasures of the flesh were pretty sparse without the flesh. Suddenly life wasn't worth living. The fact that he wasn't living it didn't cheer him up at all.
He sighed again. People were always trying this sort of thing. On the other hand, it was quite interesting to watch, and at least this was a bit more original than the usual symbolic chess game, which Death always dreaded because he could never remember how the knight was supposed to move.
Death isn't cruel – merely terribly, terribly good at his job.
It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe.
