All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think -- and never die, of course. It's sick is what it is. I don't want to be a forever-young living corpse.

I really believe that everyone has a talent, ability, or skill that he can mine to support himself and to succeed in life.

I would not cry. I do not cry. How bitter do you risk becoming by swallowing too many tears?

How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.

That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and families performed for one another! They tended the flame of memory, so no one’s death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an order of endorsement and meaning.

A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.

Little mouse, you were so quick, so bright, so sweet, so full of life. And you still are everything you were then. None of it’s lost forever. All that promise, all that hope, that love and goodness—it’s still inside you. No one can take the gifts God gave you. Only you.