“As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.”

Living safely is dangerous.

Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.

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.

I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.

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.

Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.

There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.

All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.

One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.

Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.

Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

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

Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.

The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.