Elizabeth Berg Quotes

I tried to think about these two issues very freely. With sex, I think I can manage with that. With death, this is a more difficult theme for me. I'm not a believer, even though I'm baptized. I don't practice. I don't believe in God, so I feel very alone facing death. What I discovered is that the only way to recognize death is if you are part of life, if you are part of sexual pleasure, if you link it with sexual pleasure.

I think dying is the ultimate high...

When I have conversations with people, for some strange reason they think I'm gonna die and they're not. But you know what? Death means nothing to me.

The human animal dances wildest on the edge of the grave.

When I die, I will not see myself die, for the first time.

I think about dying every day, because I can't stop thinking about living.

I definitely think about death. And every day your relationship with death changes. And every day I sort of feel like I know it more. I've always thought about it.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.

As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.

Knowledge of death is the beginning of wisdom.

The understanding that we reach a point where we stop becoming something and start ending as something. That comes at different times in different points in different people's lives, and obviously there are lots of people who experience the presence of death much more keenly and much earlier than I did. But we all come to grips with it eventually.

I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Obviously death is a theme I'm fascinated by.

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

The decisive moment in a man’s life is when he decides to confront death.

I'm happier because I had to face what all of us try not to face: that we're going to die. It's a fact.

If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?

I'm starting to get older, and began to think about mortality a little more. My mother died in 2003 and that was a big shock. When your parents start to die off, that's going to be a revelation. So for me, this album - although it might sound quite cheery - is really talking about death.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.

I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.