“No tabloid will ever print the startling news that the mummified body of Jesus of Nazareth has been discovered in old Jerusalem. Christians have no carefully embalmed body enclosed in a glass case to worship. Thank God, we have an empty tomb. The glorious fact that the empty tomb proclaims to us is that life for us does not stop when death comes. Death is not a wall, but a door.”

“One day u will be the message…a message for those who still alive…”

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies heonly appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people tocry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always willexist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we canlook at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent allthe moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just anillusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on astring, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.’When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a badcondition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of othermoments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say whatthe Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”

“Adam pressed his hand to his face. Sighed. “Right. It’s just that… He died. And I’m so freaking pissed off, I swear I’d punch him in the face if he were standing right here.”

“[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.”

“They are trying to take you back from me now, and they will—but only for a brief, little while—”

“All that tread,The globe are but a handful to the tribes,That slumber in its bosom.”

“It’s what’s known as an origin myth. What happened to me? That’s no myth.”

“You are well aware that it is not numbers or strength that bring the victories in war. No, it is when one side goes against the enemy with the gods’ gift of a stronger morale that their adversaries, as a rule, cannot withstand them. I have noticed this point too, my friends, that in soldiering the people whose one aim is to keep alive usually find a wretched and dishonorable death, while the people who, realizing that death is the common lot of all men, make it their endeavour to die with honour, somehow seem more often to reach old age and to have a happier life when they are alive. These are facts which you too should realize (our situation demands it) and should show that you yourselves are brave men and should call on the rest to do likewise.”

“Mr. Asher, you can resist who you are for only so long. Finally, you just decide to go with fate.”

“It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all.Death is a head-on collision with your plans.But everything in life–the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat–everything there is was born from a collision.Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another.And something new is created when the person you love dies.Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are.This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.”

“The Nevernever is dying, human. It grows smaller and smaller every decade. Too much progress, too much technology. Mortals are losing their faith in anything but science. Even the children of man are consumed by progress. They sneer at the old stories and are drawn to the newest gadgets, computers, or video games. They no longer believe in monsters of magic. As cities grown and technology takes over the world, belief and imagination fade away, and so do we.””What can we do to stop it?” I whispered.”Nothing.” Grimalkin raised a hind leg and scratched an ear. “Maybe the Nevenever will hold out till the end of the world. Maybe it will disappear in a few centuries. Everything dies eventually, human.”

“[Jesus] tilted His head back, pulled up one last time to draw breath and cried, “Tetelestai!” It was a Greek expression most everyone present would have understood. It was an accounting term. Archaeologists have found papyrus tax receipts with “Tetelestai” written across them, meaning “paid in full.” With Jesus’ last breath on the cross, He declared the debt of sin cancelled, completely satisfied. Nothing else required. Not good deeds. Not generous donations. Not penance or confession or baptism or…or…or…nothing. The penalty for sin is death, and we were all born hopelessly in debt. He paid our debt in full by giving His life so that we might live forever.”

“Death isn’t funny.” “Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.”

“There are far more reasons for death than there are for life.”