“Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them.”

“I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come.”

“If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing.”

“We may not understand why certain things occur in our lives, but we understand who to run to when they do.”

“I was afraid of the dead, as was everyone I knew. We were afraid of the dead because we never could tell when they might show up again.”

“We live in America,' he said. 'Everyone who speaks English understands you. How they interpret you is something else.”