Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?

The line is spoken within Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel *Going Postal* (2004). In the story, the con man-turned-postmaster Moist von Lipwig is drawn into the history of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office and the fates of those connected to it. Pratchett uses the setting’s civic institutions—post, clacks, and bureaucracy—to explore how people persist through records, messages, and, most importantly, remembrance. The remark comes in a reflective moment about death and legacy, fitting the novel’s broader concern with how names, stories, and public memory can outlast a person’s physical life.

The quote proposes a distinction between physical death and a second, cultural death: the moment a person is no longer named, recalled, or spoken of. It frames remembrance as a kind of continued life, sustained by community and language. In Pratchett’s typical humanist mode, the line elevates ordinary acts—telling stories, repeating names, keeping someone in conversation—into moral work, a way of honoring the dead and resisting oblivion. It also implies that identity is partly relational: a person’s “afterlife” depends on others’ willingness to carry them forward in memory and speech.