Livelong at Troynovant:
elixirs of longevity & immortality,
living with & without death;
listed by Title
  

I was once being interviewed by Barbara Walters in three segments, all at once, though they were to be run on three separate days.

In between two of the segments, she asked me how many books I had written, and I told her. She said, "Don't you ever want to do anything but write?"

"No", I said.

"Don't you want to go hunting? Fishing? Dancing? Hiking?"

And I said, "No! No! No! and No!"

She said, "But what would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?"

I said, "Type faster."

Isaac Asimov
Asimov Laughs Again  (1992)

Therefore let all men know that the preferring of complaints against nature and the arts is a thing well pleasing to the gods, and draws down new alms and bounties from the divine goodness; and that the accusation of Prometheus, our maker and master though he be, yea sharp and vehement accusation, is a thing more sober and profitable than this overflow of congratulation and thanksgiving: let them know that conceit of plenty is one of the principal causes of want.

Now for the gift which men are said to have received as the reward of their accusation, namely the unfading flower of youth. It seems to show that the methods and medicines for the retardation of age and the prolongation of life were by the ancients not despaired of, but reckoned rather among those things which men once had and by sloth and negligence let slip, rather than among those which were wholly denied or never offered.

Francis Bacon
"Prometheus
  or
The State of Man"
De Sapientia Veterum
  (The Wisdom of the Ancients)
translated by James Spedding

  
[A street in Rome.]

Murellus (to the commoners}:

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
...
                        Many a time and oft
Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day with patient expectation ...

William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, 1.1.34-40

  
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
    Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
    And loves, and weeps, and dies;
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.

O, write no more the tale of Troy,
    If earth Death's scroll must be!

Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Hellas"  (1821)
Shelley's Poetry and Prose

  
Descent into Hades. — I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and will often be there again; and I have not sacrificed only rams to be able to talk with the dead, but have not spared my own blood as well.

There have been four pairs who did not refuse themselves to me, the sacrificer: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I have had to come to terms when I have wandered long alone, from them will I accept judgement, to them will I listen when in doing so they judge one another. Whatever I say, resolve, cogitate for myself and others: upon these eight I fix my eyes and see theirs fixed upon me. —

May the living forgive me if they sometimes appear to me as shades, so pale and ill-humoured, so restless and, alas! so lusting for life; whereas those others then seem to me so alive, as though now, after death, they could never again grow weary of life. Eternal liveliness, however, is what counts: what do "eternal life", or life at all, matter to us!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Assorted Opinions and Maxims, #408  (1879)
in Human, All Too Human
translated by R. J. Hollingdale