The whole earth is mortal. Even the sky, the domain of hope and the rainbow, of the clouds of doubt, of thunder and lightning, the place where the sun lives in our experience, has to die. To be is to pass.

We seek immortality by trying to imagine death.

The fact of our own mortality is a fundamental impulse to fiction.

Some of the dead live on in our minds and some of the living are already dead to us.

We die alone if we refuse ourselves the solace of our own company in the theater of memory, to which we can summon all those we have loved.

The fields we cultivate are our final resting places.

That birth causes death is the solution to the riddle of the primordial crime. Mystery novels attract us as caprices to distract us from the fundamental fact that birth, the criminal that causes death, can never be brought to justice.

Death is the river that has no other bank.

A very intuitive small child can use a parent's ongoing inaccessibility to sketch the world's indifference in a way that makes that child's death real within the child.

Death walks with us and talks with us every step we take along the paths of our lives.

Death is not only cruel but also merciful. Death can surprise us by being delicate, even soft as a feather.

It is psychologically impossible to exclude from our imaginations the notion of death as a rejoining of those whom we have lost.

Death is always in the family.

When someone we love dies, just as a part of that person lives on in us, so a part of us dies along with that person. This is especially true if the one who dies is our parent, spouse, or child. If we can acknowledge the real death that has occurred within us as well as our loss of the other, then we are much freer to mourn and to go on living.