“I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.”

We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

Kisses are the remnants of paradise.

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it — I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

I like what is in the work — the chance to find yourself.

I slipped the book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.

The sea – this truth must be confessed – has no generosity. No display of manly qualities – courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness – has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

That’s why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship’s wake.

How potent is the fancy! People are so impressionable, they can die of imagination.

We all die eventually but how we lived stays forever.

We are always in awe of what the donors have done in terms of providing of themselves to the recipients. It really is a heroic act because people take on themselves not only a risk of death but also pain-and-suffering in order for their loved one to get the benefit of the liver transplant.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.

Our Saviour would love at no less rate than death; and from the supereminent height of glory, stooped and debased Himself to the sufferance of the extremest of indignities, and sunk himself to the bottom of abjectness, to exalt our condition to the contrary extreme.

By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.

As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men’s native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.