Life & Mortality Quote by Margaret Mahy

Repetition is doing double duty here: it is both a stylistic tic and a small moral stance. Mahy opens with a self-aware apology, the kind that signals a writer who knows she has been circling a hard subject and plans to keep circling anyway. The line has the gentle politeness of someone speaking to children or to the easily spooked adult part of us; it lowers the stakes just enough to let the next thought land.

Then she pivots: "However" becomes a quiet insistence. If she repeats herself, it is because death repeats itself in our lives, intruding again and again until denial stops being a sustainable plot. "Coming to terms" is telling. It is not "defeating" death or "accepting" it with saintly calm. It is contractual language, pragmatic, a bit reluctant: we negotiate with the fact of mortality, we revise the agreement as we age, we fail and try again. That realism fits an author whose work often smuggled big, unnerving truths into narratives that look, on the surface, like they might be safe.

"Part of the general human situation" universalizes without grandstanding. The phrase has a slightly philosophical, almost domestic plainness, as if mortality is another condition of living, like weather or gravity. The subtext is compassion: if you are struggling, you are not uniquely broken; you are participating in the baseline difficulty of being human. And if she sounds repetitive, it is because culture itself keeps pressuring us to forget, so the reminder has to be renewed.