“So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.”

“The young open the paper to forget about life by reading the funny strips. The old do it to forget about death by reading other people's obits. My advice: don't open the paper and go on with your life.”

“If you live life on your own terms, people will definitely not understand you”

“I often think of life as a deposit of time. We are each allocated so many years, just like a fixed sum in a bank. When twenty-four hours have passed I have spent one more day. I read in the People's Daily that the average life expectancy for a Chinese woman is seventy-two. I am already seventy-four years old. I spent all my deposits two years ago and am on bonus time. Every day is already a gift. What is there to complain of?”

“You forget that your life is a short window, that you are stuck in the present, forget how your life is still here, waiting for you, wondering where you are, going on without you. You forget that people know who you are, think about you, might even be happy to see you”

“So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It's quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you've come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about.”