“If the driving force behind bettering human life is our insatiable desire to escape mortality what will we do when we succeed?”

“The vitality of a human life can be measured by the intensity of one's desire. We know we are truly alive when we experience a drive for the "more" life. Human desire or longing is the source of our spiritual energy.”

“Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.”

“With our limited life spans, we mere mortals have to figure out what best to do with our time so that when it ends we aren't ashamed to put our name on it, call it our life.”

“We are mortals all, human and nonhuman, bound in one fellowship of love and travail. No one escapes the fate of death. But we can, with caring, make our good-byes less tormented. If we broaden the circle of our compassion, life can be less cruel.”

“Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events - a story - and when we can't figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.”