and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever;

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” he said. “I want to achieve it by not dying.” But

As long as there is death, there is hope. The only thing that keeps me alive is the hope of dying young.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.

The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever, but what's wrong with that, really?

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 don't want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.

We strive towards death like an arrow towards its target, and we never miss. Death is our only certainty, and we always know that we will die, no matter where, when, or how. The idea of eternal life is nonsense, eternity is not life, death is the rest we seek, life and death are intertwined, and those who demand something else ask for the impossible and will earn nothing but smoke.

What am I? I am the desire not to die. I have always been impelled — not that evening alone — by the need to construct the solid, powerful dream that I shall never leave again. We are all, always, the desire not to die. This desire is as immeasurable and varied as life's complexity, but at bottom this is what it is: To continue to be, to be more and more, to develop and to endure. All the force we have, all our energy and clearness of mind serve to intensify themselves in one way or another. We intensify ourselves with new impressions, new sensations, new ideas. We endeavour to take what we do not have and to add it to ourselves. Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of death. That is what it is.

The last thing any sensible human being should want is immortality. As it is, life lasts too long for most of us.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.

...I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I can't die but once.

I don't want to die.