“People die every day. That was the most comforting thought Brás had while all the obituaries he wrote at the newspaper flashed before him. He just realized that, even when he’s not writing about it, people will keep dying. Isn’t it funny how easily forget about work the moment they leave for the day? Isn’t it strange how we always seem to remember the trivial things from our daily lives, yet we so often forget the most important ones?”

“Isn’t it strange how we always seem to remember the trivial things from our daily lives... yet we so often forget the most important ones?”

“We wonder how people can't see the most obvious things about themselves, yet we forget those people are us.”

“She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.”

“We musn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.”

“He thought of how when you went out and listened to what people said, you heard all kinds of things, people washing their dirty linen in public, talking about friends and business and,gash, and it made him think how the world must be, at every minute, so full of people fighting, and jazzing, and dying, and working, and losing jobs, and it was a funny world, all right, full of funny people, millions of them. And he was only one out of all these millions of people, and they were all trying to get along, and many of them had gotten farther than he.”