Source identified
“Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.”
Voice: Epigraph / fictional source voice · Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
Twain uses dark comedy to overturn conventional emotional assumptions, forcing the reader to notice that birth begins the difficulties of life while death ends them for the person concerned.
Source note: Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter IX epigraph; a darkly comic Calendar maxim about birth and death.
Source identified
“No young man believes he shall ever die.”
Hazlitt describes the psychological distance of mortality in youth: death can be known abstractly while still feeling too remote to shape one’s immediate sense of life.
Source note: First published unsigned in The Monthly Magazine in March 1827; represented here through the public-domain Collected Works text. The statement opens an essay about youth’s felt relation to mortality.
Source identified
“Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished.”
Voice: Fictional narrator · J. (first-person narrator)
The narrator uses mortality to excuse not listing his countless imagined diseases, turning a serious phrase about short life into an absurdly practical time-saving joke.
Source note: Three Men in a Boat, Chapter I; spoken by the narrator to his doctor before he explains the one ailment he believes he does not have.
Source identified
“They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.”
The grave-digger’s observation uses dark humor to contrast conventional responses to death with a narrator who approaches the cemetery from another perspective.
Source note: The Madman, “The Grave-Digger”; the line is spoken by the grave-digger to the narrator.
Source identified
“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live.”
Voice: Dialogue speaker · Socrates
The closing sentence accepts the separation between life and death without claiming certainty about which condition is ultimately better.
Source note: Apology, final paragraph in Jowett’s translation; Socrates closes after the jury has sentenced him to death.
Source identified
“The readiness is all.”
Voice: Fictional character · Hamlet
The emphasis is not on controlling every outcome but on meeting what comes with preparedness and acceptance.
Source note: Act 5, Scene 2.