Life & Mortality Quote by Elizabeth Fishel

Comparison is the quiet sabotage hiding in plain sight of “normal” family life: a parent’s offhand “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” that lands less like motivation and more like a verdict. Elizabeth Fishel’s line works because it’s blunt about the mechanism. “Death knell” isn’t just conflict; it’s an announcement that something is already being buried. Harmony among siblings, in her framing, doesn’t usually die from a single dramatic blow-up. It’s strangled by accumulation: the tallying, ranking, and narrating of children as if they’re competing products in the same category.

Fishel’s intent is corrective. She’s warning caretakers, educators, and even siblings themselves that comparison doesn’t simply describe differences; it manufactures identities. One child becomes “the smart one,” another “the responsible one,” another “the difficult one.” Those labels then recruit everyone into a script: kids perform their assigned roles, parents interpret behavior through them, and resentment hardens because affection starts to feel conditional and scarce.

The subtext is about attention as a zero-sum resource. Comparison implies there’s a single standard and a single winner, which turns everyday life into a rigged contest for belonging. Even “positive” comparisons corrode, because being loved for outperforming someone else teaches you love can be revoked.

Contextually, this lands in a culture that treats benchmarking as virtue - grades, rankings, follower counts - and imports that logic straight into the living room. Fishel’s sentence resists that ideology with a simple moral: siblings don’t need to be equal to be close, but they do need to be seen as separate.