“The dead person is not truly dead until the last person who rememebers them dies.”

“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”

“You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.”

“A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”

“Even great men are only truly recognized and honored once they are dead. Why? Because those who praise them need to feel themselves somehow superior to the person praised, they need to feel they are making some concession. ”

“People naturally pay their respects to the dead. The person had, after all, just accomplished the personal, profound feat of dying.”