Daily Inspiration Quote by Tom Holt

Immortality gets punctured here not with a grand philosophical spear, but with a comedian’s pin: the “best definition” of an immortal is simply “someone who hasn’t died yet.” Tom Holt’s line works because it treats a revered, ancient concept like a clerical error. Instead of arguing whether immortals exist, it yanks the conversation into the only data point that actually matters: the current status of a body.

The intent is comic misdirection with a serious aftertaste. “Immortal” usually implies metaphysical specialness, a category apart from the rest of us. Holt collapses that category into a temporary condition, as flimsy as a doctor’s chart. The subtext is that immortality is often just survivorship with marketing: if you’re still here, people project destiny onto you; if you’re gone, they retroactively call it inevitable. It’s a joke about our hunger for permanence and our willingness to confuse an absence of evidence (no death so far) with evidence of absence (no death ever).

Context matters: Holt writes in the British comic-fantasy tradition where mythic creatures and cosmic rules are treated like bureaucracies and social habits. His work routinely demystifies the magical by applying deadpan logic, making gods sound like middle managers and miracles like paperwork. The line’s cynicism isn’t nihilism so much as hygiene: it scrubs away the romance that lets us outsource meaning to eternity. What’s left is bracingly mortal, and therefore urgent.