Joseph Heller Quotes

I'm gonna live forever, or die trying.

Immortality is not a gift, Immortality is an achievement; And only those who strive mightily Shall possess it.

The best definition of an immortal is someone who hasn't died yet.

I don't intend to die.

Rogues, would you live forever?

I shall not completely die.

The only thing that can kill me is death, that's the only thing that can ever stop me, is death, and even then my music will live forever.

I intend to live forever, or die trying.

I would hate to be immortal forever.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

Who wants to live forever?

The king never dies. Rex nunquam moritur.

We will never conquer death.

IMMORTAL is an ample word When what we need is by, But when it leaves us for a time, 'Tis a necessity.

Failure to die is always appreciated.

If death disappears there will be no mystery in life. That's why a dead thing has no mystery in it, a corpse has no mystery in it, because it cannot die anymore. You think it has no mystery because life has disappeared? No, it has no mystery because now it cannot die anymore. Death has disappeared, and with death automatically life disappears. Life is only one of the ways of death's expression.

In the ordinary, everyday understandings of the words involved, to say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself; while to assert that all of us live forever is to assert a manifest falsehood, the flat contrary of a universally known truth: namely, the truth that all human beings are mortal. For when, after some disaster, the 'dead' and the 'survivors' have both been listed, what logical space remains for a third category?

Death’s favorites don’t die.

The love of posterity is the consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring.

We wish our names eternally to live; Wild dream! which ne'er had haunted human thought, Had not our natures been eternal too.

How gloomy would be the mansions of the dead to him who did not know that he should never die: that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now thinks shall think on forever!

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

I'm going to live forever, or die trying !

Your greatest fear is death and your deepest craving is survival. You want Forever, you desire Eternity. In your deluded belief that you are this 'mind' or 'spirit' or 'soul', you find the escape clause in your contract with mortality. Perhaps as 'mind' you can wing free of the body when it dies, hmm?

The point is, as death gets closer - what's so wrong with wanting someone you love to live forever?