Life & Wisdom Quote by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman opens with a shrugging little aside - "and I don't suppose I'm the first" - that functions like misdirection in a magic trick. It pretends humility while sharpening the knife: the thought is old, yes, but he’s about to make it feel freshly indecent. By framing life as a "disease", he borrows the cold authority of medical language to talk about the one subject people most aggressively romanticize. Then he spikes it with the bluntest possible delivery mechanism: "sexually transmitted". It’s funny because it’s true in the most literal, least poetic sense. It also takes a sly swing at the way culture packages reproduction as legacy, destiny, or moral duty. Here it becomes infection, not inheritance.

The kicker - "invariably fatal" - lands like a punchline and a verdict. The line’s comic engine is its tonal whiplash: a stand-up cadence carrying an existential thesis. Underneath the joke is a protest against sentimental narratives that treat death as an aberration rather than the endpoint baked into the system. If life is an illness, then death isn’t tragedy so much as prognosis.

Context matters: Gaiman’s work often treats myth and mortality as neighboring rooms, with humor as the corridor between them. This kind of gallows wit shows up in fantasy precisely because fantasy can say the unsayable without pretending it’s offering a self-help cure. The subtext isn’t nihilism so much as permission: to look straight at the absurdity of being alive, and to laugh without flinching.