“Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious”

“We work so hard to avoid death because life is precious. That is why we clutch to this life so tightly. That's why we have so much anxiety, even anger, when something threatens us or our loved ones. But here's the contradiction: If you work TOO HARD to avoid death, then you're not going to have time to feel how precious life really is. You won't be able to feel it. You'll know it in your head but not in your heart.”

“There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.”

“No life can be compared to another Life unless both refer to Death! Even if a Life is different from another Life, it exists, as Life, only by referring to Death, because all other Lives it would refer to finally lead to the last referent which is a Life having as reference: Death! This is why I said the all the shine of Life consists of Death, as the shine of Death consists of Life.”

“When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.”

“Stay neurotic. Stay frustrated. Stay emotional. Stay excited. Your life is happening.”