Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Christopher Hitchens

Quote by Christopher Hitchens

“The absorbing fact about being mortally sick is that you spend a good deal of time preparing yourself to die with some modicum of stoicism (and provision for loved ones), while being simultaneously and highly interested in the business of survival. -Mortality”

Quote by Christopher Hitchens

Create image

Author

Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens was an English-American author, journalist, and social critic. He was known for his sharp wit and controversial views, particularly on religion and politics. Hitchens was a prominent figure in the public discourse of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. more

You May Also Like

“An especially close friend inquired ‘is it that you’re afraid you’ll never see England again?’ As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness. I’ll do the facing of hard facts, thanks. Don’t you be doing it too . . . ‘Yes, I suppose a time comes when you have to consider letting go.’ How true, and how crisp a summary of what I had just said to myself. But again there was an unreasonable urge to have a kind of monopoly on, or a sort of veto over, what was actually sayable. -Mortality”

DeathDyingCancerMortality
Author:Christopher Hitchens
Create image

“Gratitude needs practice, though. Gratitude for the things that don't seem to help, that aren't sought out or welcome-that's a demanding kind, and it is needed in hard times. A book about dying should have that kind of gratitude in it, bleeding through from the other side of sorrow. Drink enough of the sweet, strong mead of grief and love for being alive and it isn't long before you're sending a trembling, life-soaked greeting out to everything that came before you and to everything that will follow, a kind of love letter to the Big Story.”

LoveGriefDyingGratitude
Book:Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
Create image

“Dying wise: That's that antidote. Dying wise is the rumor around which all the attempts to control and manage and detoxify and assuage and domesticate and diminish dying swirl in our corner of the world. Dying wise is a thought unthought-a rumor-in a culture that does not believe in dying, and it will take about as much courage and wisdom as you can manage to do it. Dying wise is a life's work. Dying wise is the Rhythm, the Story, around which human life must swirl.”

WisdomDying
Book:Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
Create image

“Cost-effectiveness is the screw that turns the wheel of efficiency. But there is a considerable cost to pursuing cost-effectiveness. Here is the logarithm of progress: The more you pursue being saved from the drudgery of going through your days, the ordinariness of being around, the venality of physical limitation or vulnerability, the more is taken from the physical world to provide you that salvation and the more remote you will be from what grants you your security. That is an ecological and spiritual fact.”

SpiritualDyingEcological
Book:Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
Create image

“Our lowest infant mortality rate is bought in part by obliging infants with considerable birth abnormalities who would otherwise have died from them to live with them instead, often well into their childhoods and beyond, and by asking their families to learn how to do that. Our superb life span is purchased in part by extending old people's lives far beyond what their illness or their disease would have allowed, while still not entirely ridding them of that illness or disease. We should add a fourth record to the string of our achievements: I suspect that we also die the longest. We are not allowed to die on schedule. Often we do, but it isn't encouraged.”

DeathDying
Book:Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
Create image