#immortality

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die. ↗

— Bill Cosby

#children #die #five #give #hope

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons. ↗

— James Thurber

#any #beliefs #certain #dogs #few

Music is a form that tends to give shape to rules, social mores, social attitudes, feelings—it does this in a very beautiful, fluid way. To me the issue of form and formlessness is most strong in the theme of mortality versus a human wish for immortality of a sort. Take, for example, the definition of beauty in fashion. Remember what Alison says at the beginning? She says when she was young she didn’t know what beautiful was. She looked at this woman who everyone was saying was beautiful and she didn’t even know what they were talking about. I experienced that when I was a child. If I loved someone I thought they were really beautiful. And then eventually, I began to get it, the social concept of beauty. Not that I think beautiful is completely imaginary, but beauty is so wide ranging and fluid. Yet there’s a need to say: “This is what it is, and it’s not changing; we’re taking a picture of it to hold it still.” It’s like an impulse to put up a building meant to last forever. An urge to grab and hold something in place when nothing human can be grabbed and held in place. We come into these physical bodies . . . whatever we are takes this shape that is so particular and distinct—eyes, nose, mouth—and then it gradually begins to disintegrate. Eventually it’s going to dissolve completely. It’s a huge problem for people; we can understand it, but it breaks our hearts. And so we’re constantly trying to pin something down or leave a trace that will last forever. “And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita . . .” What other immortality will anyone share? ↗

— Mary Gaitskill

#lolita #music #nabokov #attitude

I envied these women I saw before me, their beauty still intact. Life has its revenge of life. Untimely death is the secret of eternal youth. ↗

— Shan Sa

#eternal-youth #immortality #beauty

Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#immortality #pirates #death

We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, lesser species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselve preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know we lived. ↗

— Michelle Richmond

#death

Religiously the Empire was pluralistic and marked by a search for a faith which would be satisfying intellectually and ethically and would give assurance of immortality. ↗

— Kenneth Scott Latourette

#empire #ethically #faith #give #immortality

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. ↗

— George Santayana

#endow #experience #immortality #lend #memory

Allow this poem to carry you beyond yourself, transcending your mortal flesh as you wed yourself with the potentially infinite. ↗

— Peter Davis

#immortality #infinite #art

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping. ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#death #immortality #insomnia #death