“The afterlife unravels before our eyes”

“Back before her life had begun to unravel. Or before she knew it was unraveling.”

“It is what we see when we imagine what the afterlife must be like: our happiest triumphs, our most sincere moments, stolen from the seam of our lives, a respite just before the onset of imminent tragedy.”

“What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.”

“Destiny is the road that unravels before us, the order of things both happy and tragic. Destiny is that which rules our long lives. And life is the distance we travel on that road. So there is no one real path. We all arrive at our destination, even after getting lost countless times.”

“We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.”