"If people lived forever – if they never got any older – if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy – do you think they’d bother to think hard about things, the way we’re doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less – philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world…"

— The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami