“Of how much light will my destiny’s eyes have to become aware until it will come true in death?”

“You don't understand how much light you have until the lights go out.”

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

“My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death. ... In my professional and personal life, I have lived with the awareness of death's imminence for more than half a century, and labored in its constant presence for all but the first decade of that time.”

“You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you.”

“You don't understand how much light you've got until the lights go out”