“It comes to me that fear of death is, love of the world. The desire not to be excluded from the world. That perhaps at the heart of all my assumptions is the assumption that after death I will stop being a part of things.”

“Competitiveness always rests on the assumption of a life-and-death struggle.”

“I had hoped to make her strong and healthy, and now she may be too weak herself after this slow death, like my father's slow long death, to come to me. and I am here, futile, cut off from the ritual of family love and neighborhood and from giving strength and love to my dear brave grandmother's dying whom I loved above thought. and my mother will go, and there is the terror of having no parents, no older seasoned beings, to advise and love me in this world.”

“...but it was death that changed. People are still people. Some good, some bad. Death changed, and we don't know what death really means anymore. Maybe that was the point. Maybe this is an object lesson about the arrogance of our assumptions. Hard to say. But the world? She didn't change. She healed. We stopped hurting her and she began to heal. You can see it all around. The whole world is a forest now. The air is fresher. More trees, more oxygen.”

“People prefer opinions to truth. They try to bend the world to fit their assumptions, instead of changing their assumptions to fit the world. -Mireya”

“[B]egin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in.”