Life & Mortality Quote by Judith Viorst

Domestic dread rarely gets a line this clean, this cruel, and this funny. Viorst takes a familiar setup - the partner who is late, the mind that catastrophizes - and snaps it into a binary so extreme it becomes a dare to the reader: which fear is actually worse? The joke lands because it’s morally “wrong” on purpose. Hoping your spouse is dead is an obscene thought, and Viorst knows it; she’s counting on the shock to expose a quieter, more socially acceptable panic: betrayal.

The line weaponizes everyday melodrama. “Either having an affair or lying dead in the street” is the tabloid version of a missed dinner, the kind of mental spiral that feels embarrassing until you hear it said out loud. By choosing death over infidelity, the speaker isn’t confessing homicidal fantasies so much as naming the humiliation economy inside relationships: a corpse can be mourned with dignity; an affair makes you the punchline. The subtext is less “I hate him” than “I hate what this would make me.”

Viorst, best known for her wry, psychologically tuned observations of family life, writes from a cultural moment that increasingly allowed women to admit ambivalence about marriage without dressing it up as gratitude. The line reads like a pressure valve: a one-sentence eruption of anger, insecurity, and dark self-preservation, packaged as a laugh so you can swallow it.