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Mortality QUOTES

Mortality QUOTES

1 " If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

2 " It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

3 " 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. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

4 " Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

5 " I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent solider is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

6 " In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.) "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

7 " Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling). "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

8 " Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

9 " From Alan Lightman's intricate 1993 novel Einstein's Dreams; set in Berne in 1905: 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. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

10 " From Alan Lightman’s intricate 1993 novel Einstein’s Dreams; set in Berne in 1905: 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. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

11 " To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not? "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

12 " For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

13 " In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

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

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

15 " A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

16 " I don't have a body, I am a body. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

17 " I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

18 " The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

19 " Like so many of life's varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don't so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it's time to be on my way. No, it's the snickering that gets me down. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality

20 " Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Mortality