“If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible.”— Paulo Coelho, amazon.com
“How a woman can once again become violently desirable after you have broken up remains a mystery. Some, perhaps, have the same sense of retrospective admiration of their own bodies at the moment of leaving them.”— Jean Baudrillard, amazon.com
“The spectacular truth is — and this is something that your DNA has known all along— the very atoms of your body — the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on — were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you…”— Gerald D. Waxman, amazon.com
“The general, or, it may be termed, the universal belief of the inhabitants of the earth, in the existence of spirits separated from the encumbrance and incapacities of the body, is grounded on the consciousness of the divinity that speaks in our bosoms, and demonstrates to all men, except the few wh…”— Sir Walter Scott, amazon.com
“Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh. So why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things our eulogy will…”— Arianna Huffington, amazon.com
“Barely time to register the staggering beauty, and here it is. The separation.”— Lauren Groff, amazon.com
“Cruel it seems. Let people get fond of each other: lure them on. Then tear asunder. Death.”— James Joyce, amazon.com
“Less a conclusion than a reconfiguration... Conclusions, like so much else, are impossible. Yet, memory must be served: the dead who have passed on must be buried, and the living must pass on, continue passing on until they too have passed on.”— Francis J. Ambrosio, amazon.com
“The Rapture is obviously a cataclysmic event. But I started realizing it was a metaphor for getting older, for mortality, and living with mortality. It’s really powerful. We all basically live in a world that we define by the people who have disappeared.”— Tom Perrotta, amazon.com
“Man has never signified death for woman, as she signifies it for man.”— Jean Baudrillard, amazon.com
“A dead man’s face can tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from the true existence of physical substance, how impossible it is for us to lay hands on the way in which this substance exists.”— Yukio Mishima, amazon.com
“I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe.”— Vladimir Nabokov, amazon.com
“The individual doesn’t matter. You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don’t matter. I, Dad, don’t matter. We’re vectors on the grids of cellular life. We carry 10 to 12 genes with mutations that are potentially lethal. These mutations are passed on to our children—you to me, me to Natalie. Aging f…”— David Shields, amazon.com