Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.