Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

One thing I feel clear about is that it's important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven't really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won't look back upon my forties with regret.

He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)

If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.

Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.