Fire from Heaven (1969)
“Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be…”
—
Margaret Atwood
,
book
Oryx and Crake
Source: Oryx and Crake
Last update June 3, 2021.
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Do you have more details about the quote "Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and …" by Margaret Atwood?
Margaret Atwood 348
Canadian writer 1939Related quotes
“He ne'er is crown'd
With immortality, who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead.”
Bk. II, l. 211
Endymion (1818)
"The Immortal", § IV, in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Variant: 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.
Sheri S. Tepper
(1929–2016) American fiction writer
Nell Latimer in Ch. 6 : nell latimer’s book, p. 51
The Visitor (2002)
“Reason is immortal, all else mortal.”
Pythagoras
(-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher
As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Sect. 30, as translated by Robert Drew Hicks (1925); also in The Demon and the Quantum: From the Pythagorean Mystics to Maxwell's Demon (2007) by Robert J. Scully, Marlan O. Scully, p. 11
“Law, the king of all mortals and immortals.”
Pindar
(-517–-437 BC) Ancient Greek poet
As quoted in Plato's Gorgias, 484b.
“The river was mortal and immortal as life, as becoming.”
Charles Lindbergh
(1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist
Autobiography of Values (1978)
Context: I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves? … As one identity, I was born in AD 1902. But as AD twentieth-century man, I am billions of years old. The life I consider as myself has existed though past eons with unbroken continuity. Individuals are custodians of the life stream — temporal manifestations of far greater being, forming from and returning to their essence like so many dreams. … I recall standing on the edge of a deep valley in the Hawaiian island of Maui, thinking that the life stream is like a mountain river — springing from hidden sources, born out of the earth, touched by stars, merging, blending, evolving in the shape momentarily seen. It is molecules probing through time, found smooth-flowing, adjusted to shaped and shaping banks, roiled by rocks and tree trunks — composed again. Now it ends, apparently, at a lava brink, a precipitous fall.
Near the fall's brink, I saw death as death cannot be seen. I stared at the very end of life, and at life that forms beyond, at the fact of immortality. Dark water bent, broke, disintegrated, transformed to apparition — a tall, stately ghost soul emerged from body, and the finite individuality of the whole becomes the infinite individuality of particles. Mist drifted, disappeared in air, a vanishing of spirit. Far below in the valley, I saw another river, reincarnated from the first, its particles reorganized to form a second body. It carried the same name. It was similar in appearance. It also ended at a lava brink. Flow followed fall, and fall followed flow as I descended the mountainside. The river was mortal and immortal as life, as becoming.