Life & Mortality Quote by Charles de Lint

Mortality is the dare de Lint slips under the door: stop treating death like a spoiler alert and start using it as a measure of whether your life is actually yours. The line works because it doesn’t romanticize dying; it weaponizes the idea of it. “Ready” isn’t bravado or nihilism. It’s a kind of psychological unclenching - the willingness to accept that the story ends, which is the only thing that makes choices feel real.

De Lint’s fiction lives in that borderland where the everyday brushes up against the mythic, and the quote carries that same urban-fantasy voltage: the mundane becomes charged when you remember it’s temporary. The subtext is aimed at the safety-addicted self, the version of us that confuses avoiding risk with being responsible. If you’re not “ready to die,” you’ll barter your time for the illusion of control, editing your desires down to what won’t embarrass you, won’t fail, won’t hurt. You can call that prudence; de Lint calls it not living.

The question form is doing the real work. It corners you without preaching, turning a philosophical claim into a personal audit. Are you living in a way that would make sense if tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed? Not because you should be reckless, but because refusal to face death tends to shrink a life into logistics. In de Lint’s world, courage isn’t slaying dragons. It’s consenting to finitude - and letting that consent pull you into a fuller, riskier presence.