to save one's life

1. Even if one's life depended on it, as in I couldn't eat another bite to save my life, or Betty wouldn't climb a mountain to save her life. This hyperbolic expression nearly always follows a negative statement that one wouldn't or couldn't do something. Anthony Trollope used a slightly different wording in The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848): “I shan't remain long, if it was to save my life and theirs; I can't get up small talk for the rector and his curate.”

Example Sentences

Thus, one would be bound to undergo an operation for appendicitis in order to save one's life.

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As well wrap oneself confidingly in the folds of a boa-constrictor, hoping to save one's life thereby.

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Hand to hand fights with wild animals, battles between ships of the line, vicious duels between ace-aviators in the clouds are tense fights; but they cannot compare in anxious difficulty with the struggle to bring up an unformed idea out of the subconscious mind—especially when one knows that the idea is there, and that it must be found to save one's life.

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Again and again, in view of his being asked to become a Mohammedan in order to save his life, he says in substance what he wrote on September 10, 1884, when Khartoum was surrounded with bigoted Mahdists: "If the Christian faith is a myth, then let men throw it off; but it is mean and dishonourable to do so merely to save one's life, if one believes it is the true faith."

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Meantime the Smith sat there, thinking, “What’s to be done? how’s one to save one’s life?”

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