Life & Mortality Quote by Enid Bagnold

Bagnold lands the line with the cool inevitability of someone who’s watched grief become part of the daily weather. The shock isn’t that people die; it’s how quickly the living adjust. “One gets used to it” has the numb cadence of routine, the language of a person noting a household chore. Then she slips the knife: “even if it’s only other people’s death.” That qualifying clause exposes the quiet selfishness buried inside our so-called solemnity. We don’t rehearse our own ending; we acclimate to the disappearance of others, and we call that maturity.

The sentence works because it refuses the comforting script of death as singular, sacred rupture. It treats mortality as something the mind learns to metabolize, the way a city learns sirens. Bagnold isn’t celebrating stoicism so much as indicting the human capacity for normalization. If you can “get used” to a friend, a parent, a generation vanishing, what does that say about empathy? About memory? About the stories we tell ourselves to stay functional?

Context sharpens it: Bagnold’s lifetime spans the mechanized slaughter of World War I, the interwar years, World War II, and the long aftershocks that turned mass death into a grim statistic. In that era, to remain perpetually shattered would be impossible. So the psyche adapts. Her line captures that adaptation without romance: grief doesn’t always ennoble. Sometimes it just trains you to keep going, slightly less shocked each time.