He did it (listened) as the world's most charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker's face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet.

he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

You needn't die happy when your time comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from the beginning to the end and ka is always served.

In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says.

I do believe that when we're in the process of dying, that all these emergency circuits in the brain take over. I base what I'm saying not on any empirical evidence. I think it's very possible that when you're dying, these circuits open up, which would explain this whole white-light phenomena - when people clinically die and they see their relatives and stuff and say, "Hello, it's great to see you."

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If they don't, it's just blotto. The end.