“And toward the evening of the same day, all the world's teletypes received a communication: "Death was a result of natural causes." It wasn't said whose death, but the world surmised.”

“With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.”

“[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.”

“There are people whose death leaves you with an ache of grief. A slight sting. And then there are people whose death stops time. Deaths that leave the sky murky all day long because even the sun is grieving. Deaths that shut down your muscles and stop the music. Deaths that turn every corner of your mind a shade of grey before they light up in a flame and shrivel away.”

“The only religion that ought to be taught is the religion of fearlessness. Either in this world or in the world of religion, it is true that fear is the sure cause of degradation and sin. It is fear that brings misery, fear that brings death, fear that breeds evil. And what causes fear? Ignorance of our own nature.”

“Death of the heart,' the subtitle says, Whose death? And even more important maybe, whose heart?”