End Pause

     It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.
— Don DeLillo, from White Noise, in A Portable Apocalypse, Allan Appel, p. 20.

     Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment; in reality it is a constant court in perpetual session.
— Franz Kafka, in Ibid., p. 41.

     Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in Ibid., p. 60.

     I don't want to achieve immortality through my work . . . I want to achieve it through not dying.
— Woody Allen, in Ibid., p. 58.

     He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.
— Joseph Heller, from Catch 22, in Ibid., p. 58.

     The atom bomb, as the problem of mankind's very existence, is equaled by only one other problem: the threat of totalitarian rule (not simply dictatorship, Marxism, or racial theory), with its terroristic structure that obliterates all liberty and human dignity. By one, we lose life; by the other, a life that is not worth living.
— Karl Jaspers, from The Future of Mankind, in Ibid., p. 207.