Life & Mortality Quote by Joseph Heller

A vow like this sounds heroic until you hear the smirk under it. Heller’s line takes the grand romantic pledge and rigs it with a trapdoor: “live forever” is obviously impossible, yet the alternative - “die in the attempt” - is treated as if it’s merely the fine print on an ambitious life plan. That’s the Heller move: inflate a man’s resolve to the size of myth, then let logic puncture it.

The intent is to expose how easily human aspiration turns into self-parody. The speaker isn’t just ambitious; he’s addicted to the idea of beating the terms of existence. “Decided” implies bureaucratic certainty, like immortality is a policy choice. Heller uses that cool administrative verb to mock the way people treat destiny as a spreadsheet you can optimize with enough grit. The comedy lands because the syntax forces two outcomes that are secretly the same. Trying to live forever means never accepting limits; refusing limits is often how people sprint toward destruction.

The subtext is darker than the punchline: a culture that worships winning doesn’t leave much room for ordinary survival, for compromise, for aging, for being finite without feeling like a failure. Heller, writing in the long shadow of World War II and best known for Catch-22’s manic logic, understood how institutions and ego can collaborate to make death sound like a reasonable cost of doing business. This line skewers the macho fantasy of invulnerability and the fatal bargain it smuggles in: if you can’t be immortal, at least be spectacular.