Mortality

by Christopher Hitchens

knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.

Pascal assumes both a cynical god and an abjectly opportunist human being.

Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.

“Until you have done something for humanity,” wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.”

a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask … It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.

Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality.

What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free.

That he not busy being born is busy dying.

I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.

Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can’t run away from.

Vertiginous feeling of being kicked forward in time: catapulted toward the finish line.

Montaigne: “Religion’s surest foundation is the contempt for life.”

Also, ordinary expressions like “expiration date” … will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license? People say—I’m in town on Friday: will you be around? WHAT A QUESTION!

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts … and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own … Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.