“If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!”

In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.

Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.

To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.

And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.

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.

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.

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.

For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

That really fuels me and for some, it’s the first time they have seen Aladdin.

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

What fuels me is that there are a lot of people coming to Broadway and to the show [Aladdin] for the first time.

I remember the first time I saw a Broadway show and how excited I was.

It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.

First impressions are always the most important.

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.