Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born.

The line appears in material Mark Twain dictated late in life (circa 1906–1907) that was initially withheld from the 1924 autobiography edition. It was later published by editor Charles Neider in a 1958 Harper’s Magazine piece and then incorporated into Neider’s expanded 1959 autobiography edition. Twain uses the idea of pre-birth nonexistence to argue that death (as annihilation) should not be frightening.

Twain frames death as a return to the same state as before birth, which he treats as peaceful and free of suffering. By contrasting that long absence with the pains of lived experience, he suggests that fearing nonexistence is irrational compared with the real hardships of life.

“Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.”

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”