Life & Mortality Quote by Octavio Paz

Time is usually sold to us as something we can spend, save, or waste. Paz flips that comforting metaphor into a sentence with teeth: if we are "condemned" to kill time, we are not masters of the clock but prisoners of it, carrying out a slow execution. The casual idiom becomes a moral and existential charge. "Kill time" sounds harmless, even modern and breezy; Paz forces us to hear the violence we smuggle into everyday language, then turns it back on the speaker. The punchline is chillingly logical: to kill time is to kill the medium of your own living, so you "die bit by bit."

The intent is less self-help scolding than a critique of distraction as a cultural default. Paz, writing out of the 20th century's machinery of schedules, bureaucracy, and mass entertainment, understood how modern life makes time feel like an enemy to be managed rather than a world to be inhabited. "Condemned" hints at systems bigger than individual choice: labor routines, political pressures, even the psychic fatigue of postwar modernity. Yet the line also implicates the self. The passive voice doesn't let you off the hook; it suggests complicity in your own erosion.

As a poet, Paz goes for compression and paradox. The power is in the shift from metaphor to consequence: a throwaway phrase becomes a slow-motion obituary, exposing how the strategies we use to avoid emptiness can end up manufacturing it.