“Imminent death didn't terrify her as much as did the prospect of having lived a life in perpetual retreat, a life that would amount now to so much less than she'd ever hoped,...”

“I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)”

“How much easier my life would be if I did not love you! I thought. How much less painful, but how much plainer. How much less color there would be in the world.”

“It had not seemed difficult, on a small income, to know what was right to do....Now, with so much, it was daily a decision: what was necessary, what was frivolous...It was so much gray--so little black and white; for a year she'd spent more of her time questioning herself and how she lived in Truth than she had done altogether in her life.”

“My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death. ... In my professional and personal life, I have lived with the awareness of death's imminence for more than half a century, and labored in its constant presence for all but the first decade of that time.”

“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined. ”