“The brain acknowledged the approach of death while the heart stubbornly insisted upon immortality.”

“When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster.”

“Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.”

“To you of great faith, I am the product of your wisdom and the guarantor of your immortality.”

“Living in the modern age,death for virtue is the wage.So it seems in darker hours.Evil wins, kindness cowers.Ruled by violence and vicewe all stand upon thin ice.Are we brave or are we mice,here upon such thin, thin ice?Dare we linger, dare we skate?Dare we laugh or celebrate,knowing we may strain the ice?Preserve the ice at any price?”

“Ozzie Boone...insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow.By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.”

“He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.”