Elly McCabe

“We seem to have all the power and control in the world over our information, and at the same time no power or control at all. Our digital information could either be indelible, affecting how others see us and how people will remember us for evermore, or it could vanish, eliminating any evidence that we ever existed and rendering us victims of a twentyfirst century Dark Age. And while the era of information might have dangled the tantalising prospect of perpetuity in our faces, death has always found ways of defeating our fantasies of immortality. Everlasting life has always been an illusion, a mirage in the desert, and the digital age may not change that as much as one might expect.”
― Elaine Kasket, All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of your Personal Data

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“But mostly we want the suicidal, at least those who plan to die for existential reasons, to see that these great thinkers didn’t stop thinking at the point of killing God. Being mortal was not the end of the story. They continued to explore the implications of the existential givens, each concluding that life was very much worth living. They argued that we should celebrate life—rejoice in the freedom to build meaning and create our own essence. Life doesn’t end by accepting our mortality or our simple animal nature. In fact, the opposite is true. Acceptance is the beginning of writing one’s own personalised, and never to be repeated, story.”
― Rachel E. Menzies, Mortals: How the fear of death shaped human society

“I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre