It is a good thing to have had a friend, even if one is about to die.
When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor.
He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands.
And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did.
I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did.
He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did.
He was individual.
He was an important man.
I've never gotten over his death.
Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died.
How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands.
He shaped the world.
He did things to the world.
The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.
Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.
— I'm too young to die!
— I'm not, but I still don't wanna!
It was wrong of you to come. You will suffer. I shall look as if I were dead; and that will not be true...
We are all going to die someday. For the lucky few of us it'll be nice and fast. But for most of us it'll be just as long and slow and painful as a conversation with you.
This is how I met Marla Singer. Marla's philosophy of life is that she might die at any moment. The tragedy, she said, was that she didn't.
I have an organ more important than my heart. Although you can’t see it, I feel it going through my head down to my feet, and I know it exists within me. It lets me stand on my feet, it lets me walk forward without trembling. If I stop here, I feel like it would break… My soul will break. Even if I become a hunchbacked old man, I will still go forward.
But no matter how many allies you have around you. When you die, you'll be alone.
Life and death, energy and peace. If I stop today, it was still worth it. Even the terrible mistakes that I made and would have unmade if I could. The pains that have burned me and scarred my soul, it was worth it, for having been allowed to walk where I've walked, which was to hell on earth, heaven on earth, back again, into, under, far in between, through it, in it, and above.