“Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world.”

“My relationship with him was defined by these complex emotions, this mixture of gratitude and resentment.”

“If people lived forever—if they never got any older—if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy—do you think they’d bother to think hard about things, the way were doing now? I mean, we think about its everything, more or less—philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, the complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world.”

“I think about dying every day, because I can't stop thinking about living.”

“When I can't sleep, I always wrap something around my neck and close my eyes and imagine myself being strangled to death. Then I can fall asleep--it feels like sinking deep underwater”

“Not only do you become what you think about, but the world also becomes what you think about. Those who think that the world is a dark place are blind to the light that might illuminate their lives. Those who see the light of the world view the dark spots as merely potential light.”

“Love and death are not different things, they are the front and back of the same thing”