There is such poetry in the evolution of language. Now, quick means, almost exclusively, rapid. We understand it when paired with the dead, as death’s opposite but we almost never describe the living as the quick anymore. But that is how the word began. To be quick once meant to be alive. That’s it. But because life is brief and flies so quickly – the word began to also mean fast.
And life is so quick that quick no longer means life, it is now pure speed. Quickly, a life, a quickness, evolves into something else entirely.
The Hamlet Project 