"If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd."

— Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion 🌻

"Success is not money, cars, fame or material possessions but the lives you touched positively."

— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha 🌻

"If death is no longer a fear, we're really free. Free to take any risk under the sun for Christ and for love."

— John Piper, Good News of Great Joy: Daily Readings for Advent 🌻

"Besides, if I am truly immortal, I am my own grandchild, my own descendant, my own dynasty. I am not obliged to live on through what I pass down to others."

— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume 🌻

"Shall a mangrave his sorrows upon a stone when he hath but need to write them onthe water? Nay, oh /She/, I will live my day, and grow old with mygeneration, and die my appointed death, and be forgotten."

— H. Rider Haggard, She 🌻

"I once met a traveler who told me he would live to see the end of time. He laid out all his vitamins before me and told me he slept seven hours every night, no more or less. All the life you want, he said. It's all within the palm of your hand now. He said he would outlast all the wars and all the diseases, long enough to remember everything, and long enough to forget everything. He'd be the last man still standing when the sun decides to collapse upon itself and history ends. He said he had found the safest place on earth, where he could stay until the gateway to the beyond opened before him. A thousand generations from today. I pictured him there, atop a remote and snowy mountain. The heavens opening and God congratulating him for his perseverance. Asking him to join Him and watch as the sun burns down to a dull orange cinder and everything around it breaks is orbit and goes tumbling tumbling away, everything that once seemed permanent pulled apart so effortlessly, like a ball of yarn. A life into divinity.But I knew it was a lie. I've always known it was a lie. You can not hide from the world. It will find you. It always does. And now it has found me. My split second of immortality is over. All that's left now is the end, which is all any of us ever has."

— Drew Magary, The Postmortal 🌻

"This is the gift and the sorrow of the Athanate"

— to see your loves pass before you like the days of summer while your heart still beats. To keep your vigil in the shadows and rise again with every sun. 🌻

"Music is a form that tends to give shape to rules, social mores, social attitudes, feelingsit 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 didnt know what beautiful was. She looked at this woman who everyone was saying was beautiful and she didnt 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 theres a need to say: This is what it is, and its not changing; were taking a picture of it to hold it still. Its 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 distincteyes, nose, mouthand then it gradually begins to disintegrate. Eventually its going to dissolve completely. Its a huge problem for people; we can understand it, but it breaks our hearts. And so were 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 🌻