Quotes about immortality

I don't think he needs to be immortal. I think all he needs to do is to write the right story. Because some stories do live forever.

He'd looked death in the face many times, or more precisely Death had looked him in the back of his rapidly retreating head many times, and suddenly the prospect of living forever didn't appeal. (p. 149)

And now I think about it, I never really wanted to live forever. I just want to live well.

“Here I thought they were invincible.”

“They’re immortal. It’s not the same thing.”

I wish that I could believe not in mortality but in reincarnation or individual immortality; I wish that I could be living again in another body or, God help me, even watching from the edge of a fleecy cloud in Heaven or out through the dirty windowpane of a haunted house or through the dull eyes of a dung beetle or on any terms. On any terms I want to be watching, I want to be there, I want to be around, when we reach the stars, when we take over the universe and the universes, when we become the God in whom I do not believe as yet because I do not believe he exists as yet nor will exist until we become Him.

Amnesia was the price of immortality.

Anything that lives forever gets bored.

The Seventh Men were completely without interest in the universal and the unseen. The beauty which they sought to create was ephemeral and very largely sensuous. And they were well content that it should be so. Personal immortality, said a dying sage, would be as tedious as an endless song.

The Beater has still been young enough to feel immortal, at least on his better days. It was all, Wow, if we don’t slow down, we’re gonna die before we get old, except somehow it hadn’t happened that way. So they’d all assumed it never would, not dying, not getting old—hell, not even growing up.

We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

I can’t live forever. Each time something like this affair lands in my lap, I suddenly recall that I don’t want to live forever.

I believe our only hope of immortality lies in our actions, in what we do to and for others, and in our children.