“No matter where; of comfort no man speak:Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;Make dust our paper and with rainy eyesWrite sorrow on the bosom of the earth,Let's choose executors and talk of wills:And yet not so, for what can we bequeathSave our deposed bodies to the ground?Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,And nothing can we call our own but deathAnd that small model of the barren earthWhich serves as paste and cover to our bones.For God's sake, let us sit upon the groundAnd tell sad stories of the death of kings;How some have been deposed; some slain in war,Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;All murder'd: for within the hollow crownThat rounds the mortal temples of a kingKeeps Death his court and there the antic sits,Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,Allowing him a breath, a little scene,To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,Infusing him with self and vain conceit,As if this flesh which walls about our life,Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thusComes at the last and with a little pinBores through his castle wall, and farewell king!Cover your heads and mock not flesh and bloodWith solemn reverence: throw away respect,Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,For you have but mistook me all this while:I live with bread like you, feel want,Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,How can you say to me, I am a king?”

“For God's sake, let us sit upon the groundAnd tell sad stories of the death of kings;How some have been deposed; some slain in war,Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;All murder'd: for within the hollow crownThat rounds the mortal temples of a kingKeeps Death his court and there the antic sits,Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,Allowing him a breath, a little scene,To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,Infusing him with self and vain conceit,As if this flesh which walls about our life,Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thusComes at the last and with a little pinBores through his castle wall, and farewell king!”

“Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;Make dust our paper and with rainy eyesWrite sorrow on the bosom of the earth,Let's choose executors and talk of wills”

“Some people create war and misery, some create wealth and money, and some create ideas and art. But we all create our own deaths, fashioned out of our lives. Nobody will remember how you died, if nobody remembers how you lived. Forgoing freak accidents, we all choose how we die by how we live. Suicide, old age, AIDS, Cirrhosis of the liver, our deaths tell of how we lived. And even in a freak accident, if we are worth remembering, our lives will overshadow our deaths. If Henry Ford had gotten run over by a Mercedes, people would still remember him as the driver of the hit and run that changed history with his automobile assembly lines.”

“Just like any woman,...we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our chicdren, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.”

“For in him we live and move and have our being.’As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.”