Quotes About Immortality

This is what Achilles will feel like when he is old. And then I remembered: he will never be old.

But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.

Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, Prometheus had told me, the story they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.

The last thing I think is: Achilles.

He is a mortal," she says. "And mortals die." "I am a mortal!" he screams. "What good is godhead, if it cannot do this? What good are you?

Have you no more memories?' I am made of memories. The memories come, and come. We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.

For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay.

In our stories these divinities had to work by wheedling and flattery, by favors won from stronger gods. They could not do much themselves. Except live, forever.

Overhead the constellations dip and wheel. My divinity shines in me like the last rays of the sun before they drown in the sea. I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.

We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but each other

But these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one wrist, followed closely by the I.T. and T. team putting the permanent phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your number goes back in the bank. It will be the first provable immortality the world has ever known.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.

Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.

the mythical bird that set fire to itself and rose anew from the ashes every five hundred years;

to burn itself on a funeral pyre and then rise up from its own ashes. Under the drawing, Owen had written: "OFTEN A SYMBOL OF REBORN IDEALISM, OR HOPE—OR AN EMBLEM OF IMMORTALITY." And

Latin inscription that meant "forever." IN AETERNUM

May the spirit of death make a clerical error and forget you exist.

Aunque todo lo demás falle, siempre podemos asegurarnos la inmortalidad cometiendo algún error espectacular.

I wish to believe in immortality-I wish to live with you forever.

If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.

If I am destined to be happy with you here—how short is the longest Life—I wish to believe in immortality—I wish to live with you for ever.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!