“I want us to be doing things, prolonging life's duties as much as we can. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”

Variant: I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.

Source: Ironside

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality
Context: Glorious is the risk! — καλος γαρ ο κινδυνος, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying … Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression on me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die — no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live — this poor "I" that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.

Source: On women being told to control their own impulses in “Lisa Taddeo on her bestseller Three Women: 'I thought I was writing a quiet little book'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/06/lisa-taddeo-interview-three-women in The Guardian (2019 Dec 6)

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 18 (p. 148)

Source: Reflected in You

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

An Afternoon with Mark Pesce: The Uncut Version http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/interview.html

On not caring about what other people think about her writing in “An Interview with Amulya Malladi” http://jaggerylit.com/an-interview-with-amulya-malladi/ in Jaggery