“and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.”

“No: that fear had been inside him for manyyears, it had lived with him, it had been another shadow cast over hisown shadow ever since the night he awoke, shaken by a bad dream,and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as hehad always believed, but an immediate reality.”

“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”

“Plato had one Big Idea from which everything else derived. He fundamentally defined reality as that which is permanent and unchanging. Only ideas are permanent and unchanging; anything material deteriorates and decays.”

“Death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end.”

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”