I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

The dignity we seek in dying is not to be found in our final weeks, days or moments but in the way we live and how we are seen by those people whose lives we affect.

The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope that we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.

The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one's own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.

The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are. Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love.

Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.

There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents.