Life & Mortality Quote by Lenny Bruce

"I'll die young, but it's like kissing God" is Lenny Bruce turning self-destruction into sacrament, a one-line vaudeville act with a knife in it. The hook is the whiplash: mortality framed not as tragedy but as intimacy with the divine. Bruce doesn’t reach for heaven; he makes heaven feel like a back-alley dare. That’s his whole method - taking the holy language America uses to police behavior and smearing it with the bodily, the profane, the too-real.

The specific intent is both brag and confession. He’s preempting the moralists: if you’re going to call me dirty, doomed, or damned, fine - I’ll narrate my own ending and make it sound ecstatic. The subtext is addiction and compulsion without naming either. "Die young" reads like a forecast and a threat; "kissing God" is the rush, the peak, the private moment you can’t explain to people who only understand rules. It’s also a comic’s survival tactic: if you can turn your fear into a punchline, you control the room for another beat.

Context matters because Bruce wasn’t just telling jokes; he was being prosecuted for them. Obscenity trials turned his act into a public autopsy in slow motion, with the state cast as prudish priest. So the line doubles as a critique of American sanctimony: the same culture that worships God also creates the conditions for an early death, then acts shocked by the body. Bruce compresses all of that into one blasphemous, tender image - a kiss that burns.