- We hate death for two reasons. It ends life prematurely; and we do not know what lies behind it.
- The function of death is to put tension in life; and the more we increase the length and the security of individual existence then the more tension we remove from it.
- Pleasure is the product of death; not an escape from it.
- Death is in us and outside us; beside us in every room, in every street, in every field, in every car, in every plane.
- Death is what we are not every moment that we are, and every moment that we are is the moment when the dice comes to rest. We are allways playing Russian roulette.
- The more absolute death seems, the more authentic life becomes.
- Time is the flesh and blood of death; death is not a skull, a skeleton, but a clock face, a sun hurtling through a sea of thin gas. A part of you has died since you began to read this sentence.
- Convince a man that he has only this life and he will do what most of us do about the houses we live in. They may not be the most desireable houses we can imagine, we may wish they were larger, more beautiful, newer, older – but we accept that this is the house we have to live in now, and we do our best to make it habitable. I am not a temporary tenant, a casual lodger in my pesent life. It is my house, and the only one I shall ever own. I have only this.