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Life & Mortality Quote by Nastassja Kinski

"But when it really happens I'm very fascinated, I'm waiting for the moment, because the moment where life abandons you and death steps in, that moment must be fantastic, no?"

About this Quote

Kinski’s line lands with the unsettling candor of someone used to performing extremes for the camera, then casually admitting she’s curious about the one scene nobody rehearses. She frames death not as a moral event or a tragedy, but as a cinematic cut: life exits, death enters. That stage-direction phrasing ("steps in") makes the boundary feel legible, almost choreographed, the way an actress might imagine any transformation - as blocking, timing, the perfect beat.

The word choice does the real work. "Fascinated" is cooler than "afraid"; it’s the vocabulary of spectatorship, not suffering. "I’m waiting for the moment" sounds like anticipation, even fandom, turning the most taboo subject into a kind of premiere. Then she spikes it with "fantastic", a term that can mean wondrous, unreal, or simply hard to believe - conveniently leaving the emotional valence ambiguous. That ambiguity is the subtext: she’s flirting with dread while refusing to grant it authority.

The tag "no?" matters as much as the rest. It’s a soft, conspiratorial invitation for the listener to validate her curiosity, to share the transgressive thought so it feels less like morbidity and more like honesty. Contextually, it echoes a certain European art-culture tradition where eroticism, mortality, and the camera’s gaze braid together; the actress persona becomes a laboratory for taboo feelings. The intent isn’t to glamorize death so much as to reclaim agency over it: if you can name the moment, imagine it, even aestheticize it, you’re not entirely powerless before it.

Quote Details

TopicMortality
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Kinski, Nastassja. (2026, January 16). But when it really happens I'm very fascinated, I'm waiting for the moment, because the moment where life abandons you and death steps in, that moment must be fantastic, no? FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/but-when-it-really-happens-im-very-fascinated-im-90076/

Chicago Style
Kinski, Nastassja. "But when it really happens I'm very fascinated, I'm waiting for the moment, because the moment where life abandons you and death steps in, that moment must be fantastic, no?" FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/but-when-it-really-happens-im-very-fascinated-im-90076/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"But when it really happens I'm very fascinated, I'm waiting for the moment, because the moment where life abandons you and death steps in, that moment must be fantastic, no?" FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/but-when-it-really-happens-im-very-fascinated-im-90076/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Nastassja Kinski (born January 24, 1959) is a Actress from Germany.

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