“I got out on the street and started crying the kind of hysterical tears made justifiable only by turning off one’s cell phone, putting it to the ear, and pretending to be told of a death in the family.”

“Every morning is my birthday and every night is my death-day.”

“Our immortality comes through our children and their children. Through our roots and branches. The family is immortality. And Hitler has destroyed not just branches and roots, but entire family trees, forests. All of them, gone.”

“I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die.”

“HAMLET […] we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that’s the end.CLAUDIUS Alas, alas.HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this?HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.”

“Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man”

“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A Power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable. . . has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. . . And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man. . . The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”

“Committing suicide so as not to be murdered is the worst reason I’ve ever heard of to die. ”

“I basked in you;I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.And death doesn’t prevent me from loving you.Besides, in my opinion you aren’t dead.(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)”

“Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!”

“If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there’s no use continuing such behavior when you’re dead.”

“DisciplineI am old and I have hadmore than my share of good and bad.I’ve had love and sorrow, seen sudden deathand been left alone and of love bereft.I thought I would never love againand I thought my life was grief and pain.The edge between life and death was thin, but then I discovered discipline.I learned to smile when I felt sad, I learned to take the good and the bad, I learned to care a great deal morefor the world about me than before.I began to forget the “Me” and “I”and joined in life as it rolled by: this may not mean sheer ecstasybut is better by far than “I” and “Me.”

“We walk into the rest of our lives together, not knowing it’ll end before it’s truly started.”

“Sin, death, and hell have set their marks on him,And all their ministers attend on him.”

“The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.”