“Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span...”

“In a span of months she had present for birth and for death, the wondrous first breath and the horrible last. But wasn't it an honor to be there at the end of life as well as the beginning? To mark the extraordinariness of a lifetime, to bear witness to its completion?”

“Life is a disease, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.”

“Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.”

“I believe it's after the honeymoon ends that true love begins. It's in the hard times that the greater virtues of love reveal themselves, like tolerance and patience and kindness.”

“We are all, I realise, even as I write this, merely moving closer to our deaths. At the end of this sentence I am closer to mine than I was at the beginning. It's relentless. It's a savage thing. And yet for a long time I've carried with me a sense of life opening out. Evidently it's some kind of protective illusion.”