It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed

Had he known his death was imminent, he might have gone somewhere else. Instead, he did what we all do. He went about his dull routine as if all the days in the world were still to come

I spent it sitting next to Rosa’s tomb, speaking with her, accompanying her on the first part of her journey to the Hereafter, which is when it’s hardest to detach yourself from earth and you need the love of those who have remained behind, so you can leave with at least the consolation of having planted something in someone else’s heart

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.

At either of those places you felt that you were taking part in a crusade.  That was the only word for it although it was a word that had been so worn and abused that it no longer gave its true meaning.  You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and part strife, something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion.  It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at Leon and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado.  It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it.  It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that your own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty.  But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too.  You could fight.

Madness need not be all breakdown.  It may also be break-through.  It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death

When I’m in a sober mood, I worry grumble and think. // When I’m in a drunken mood, I gamble play and drink.//But when my moods are over, and my time has come to pass,//I hope I’m buried upside-down so the world can kiss my ass.

you only spend one day on your death bed... its the 30000 days before that actually matter

i miss him and i feel terrible that he died like that and it seems so unfair and such a waste. but i feel other things too, guilt especially. guilt that we left him on his own, that we didn't try harder. i think we should have done more. and i feel angry, angry at him. angry that he was so weak and didn't try harder. angry that he was such a genius but didn't do enough with it. sometimes you just have to be brave.

Life and death weren’t opposites in Nature: one was merely an extension of the other.