“It was the first time I had ever seen someone die, and it wasn't what I expected...I stood there waiting for something momentous to happen, for someone to say something profound, but there was nothing...I still had the childish notion that since my life was so important, all lives were so important. Since my death would be so cataclysmic, all deaths would be so cataclysmic.”

“If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is not another practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life.”

“Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.”

“Something in my gut twisted so hard that it felt like I was being tickled by an invisible hand, and it took me a moment to realize what it was. Hope. It had been so long since I'd felt it that the sensation was like something living inside me, something wonderful waiting to break free, just like I was.”

“I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.”

“I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn't expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything - fortune, love, even a limb - if I could simply survive.”