This article considers some instances of the word "quick" in early modern literature: a word which in the period referred to the living - or in a Christian sense, resurrected - body. It discusses the impulse in some early modern texts to pun on the fact that this flexible word for being alive also meant "speed". In turn, it compares this with the way in which speed has been an important category for considering the limits of the body under modernity in twentieth-century critical theory.