“This is not what death should be. Death, the reason for religion, the subject of great literature, the certainty we spend our lives warding off, the giant mystery that looms over everything we do, death should be spectacular, not pity-inducing, a bang and not a whimper. A huge ball of fire, a shower of sparks, a final charge into the ranks of your enemies, a terrific explosion, a backward dive into the fiery pit. Not. . .this.”

“My emotional range is limited. I can’t do grief, but rage is my friend. For instance, I hate death by sickness. It is nothing like Homer, the Old Testament, and Tolkien led me to expect. It is not noble and awe-inspiring. No one delivers a final soliloquy. It is as abrupt and banal as the flicking of a switch. The squiggly line on the monitor straightens out, the defibrillator doesn’t even go whomp, the epinephrine is useless, the nurse doing CPR looks up and even before the doctor pronounces the words, you know. This is not what death should be. Death, the reason for religion, the subject of great literature, the certainty we spend our lives warding off, the giant mystery that looms over everything we do, death should be spectacular, not pity-inducing, a bang and not a whimper. A huge ball of fire, a shower of sparks, a final charge into the ranks of your enemies, a terrific explosion, a backward dive into the fiery pit. Not. . . this.”

“We should always be prepared for attacks by the enemy and be capable of looking into the eye of death so that death may light our path.”

“Are ideals attainable? Do we live to abolish death? No-we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death's sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.”

“And is death not the ultimate orgasm, a return to that otherworldly ether, whose very origins were indeed a Big Bang, the ultimate explosion, the supreme chaos, whose resonance is the vibration we constantly seek to reproduce in everything we do.”

“We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.”