Life & Mortality Quote by Edvard Munch

The line reads like a birth announcement written in charcoal: not a complaint, but a self-authored origin myth. Munch doesn’t say misfortune visited him; he casts “Disease, insanity, and death” as “angels,” a word that usually promises protection. The twist is the point. By sanctifying what should be monstrous, he reframes suffering as destiny and, more importantly, as accompaniment - a constant presence that shapes perception. “Attended my cradle” is intimate and domestic, the horror scaled down to the nursery. The threat isn’t out there; it’s in the family, in the air of the room.

See the context and the metaphor sharpens. Munch’s childhood was marked by tuberculosis, the deaths of his mother and sister, and his father’s religious anxiety; later came bouts of depression, alcoholism, and a nervous breakdown. In late-19th-century Europe, illness was both a biological fact and a cultural obsession - the era’s art and literature treated nerves and decay as modernity’s shadow. Munch isn’t merely reporting trauma; he’s staking a claim that his art is inseparable from it.

That’s the subtext: if these “angels” have followed him “throughout my life,” then they’re also the witnesses behind the work. It’s a preemptive defense against dismissal (“too morbid”) and a manifesto for expressionism: inner affliction as the most honest subject matter. The sentence turns biography into aesthetic license, making pain not an obstacle to creation but its escort.