Life & Mortality Quote by Leo Kottke

Kottke drops this line with the offhand brutality of someone who’s learned that grief doesn’t arrive as a single tragic event; it rewires your whole sense of direction. “Nose dive” is an unglamorous, bodily image, closer to a kid crashing a bike than a poet staging a grand fall. That’s the point: he’s describing depression and self-erasure as momentum, not melodrama, the way a child might feel their life tilting without having language for it.

The genius sting is in “practicing something that siblings do.” Practice is what musicians do, what disciplined people do, what you do on purpose. He frames a suicidal impulse as rehearsal, as if death is a move you learn by watching, which turns mourning into a dark kind of apprenticeship. It also captures the confusing logic kids can carry: if someone you love disappeared, maybe disappearing is the only available way to stay close to them.

“Follow in their footsteps” is usually a proud family phrase, the kind that flatters lineage and continuity. Kottke flips it into a knife: the inherited path isn’t a career or a temperament, it’s an exit. That inversion lands because it mirrors how loss can contaminate everyday language; even the warmest cliches become dangerous scripts.

Coming from a musician, there’s an implied rhythm to it: the sentence keeps tumbling forward, barely stopping to breathe, like the mind of an 11-year-old trying to outrun the fact of death and instead running straight at it.