"He shook A Night to Remember at them. 'They say the dead can't speak, but they can! The people in this book died over sixty years ago, in the middle of the ocean, with no one around them for miles, but they still speak to you. They still send us messages -- about love and courage and death! That's what history is, and science, and art. That's what literature is. Its the people who went before us tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!'" (Connie Willis Passage 544)

"The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They're Caear's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, 'Remember Caesar, thou art mortal.'" (Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 86)

"The arts can provide invaluable entry points into the diversity, particularity and commonality of grief, dying, death and loss. Similar to the most skillful therapy, they invite us to uncover, express, revisit and appreciate our own stories." (Bertman 24)

"All stories are full of bias and uniqueness; they mix fact with meaning. This is the root of their power. Stories allow us to see something familiar through new eyes... Facts bring us knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom... We carry with us every story we have ever heard and every story we have ever lived, filed away at some deep place in our memory. We carry most these stories unread, as it were, until we have grown the capacity of the readiness to read them. oo When that happens they have grown the capacity of the readiness to read them. When that happens they may come back to us filled with a previously unsuspected meaning. It is almost as if we have been collecting pieces of a greater wisdom, sometimes over many years, without knowing." (Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, Kitchen Table Wisdom)

"But whether we fear death and refuse to face it, or whether we romanticize it, death is trivialized. Both despair and euphoria about death are an evasion." (Sogyal Rinpoche The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying 10)

"Tell me Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable -- the one certainty you know concerning your future and mine?' 'That we shall die.' 'Yes, there's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. ... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next." (Ursula K. LeGuin, Left Hand Of Darkness 72)

"You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality. ... The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die." (Atwood 17-18)

"We fail to value life as a frail bit of good luck in a world based on chance." (Arthur Frank At the Will of the Body 128)

"There are so many things we can't do, any of us, for whatever the reasons -- time, talent, life's callous whims. We're all on a one-way trip into infinity. If we're lucky, we're given some life's work we care about, or some person. Or both, if we're very lucky." (Joan Vinge "View from the Height" 410).

"We're all dying, Nyle,' said Muncie. 'Haven't you figured that out yet? We all have to leave sometime.' (Karen Hesse Phoenix Rising 174)

"One of the chief reasons we have so much anguish and difficulty facing death is that we ignore the truth of impermanence." (Sogyal Rinpoche Tibetan Book of Living and Dying 25)

"You will die. We will die. I will die. All storytelling tries to avoid that fact -- as, every hour of the day, do we -- and all storytelling, in avoiding the fact, only makes it the more inescapable. We want to become stories because stories go on forever and we do not." (McConnell 223)

"Death is a cultural event and societies as well as individuals reveal themselves in their treatment of death. Historians can profitably discover important patterns of social and cultural life by examining ideas and institutions associated with death." (Farrell 14 cited in Welford 14).

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made or a garden planted. Something your hand touched, some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there." (Bradbury 156)

"For Americans, death is un-American and an affront to every citizen's inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." (Arnold Toynbee)

"People die in a manner consistent with the deeper levels of their life patterns." (Virginia Hine)

"Death defines life... Each of us dies the death he has made for himself ... Death, like life, is not transferable." Octavio Paz

"Death has always been a fearful thing to men. We believe with the psalmist who says, "A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee.' Deep down, we believe, or would like to believe that we are immortal." (Elisabeth K‡bler-Ross 114)

"The syllogism he had learnt from ... logic ... 'Cassius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Cassius is mortal', had always seemed to him correct as applied to Cassius but certainly not as applied to himself." (Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illich)

"Surviving. ...that's what we do, you know. We don't change our behavior, we adapt to the results of it....When the last housefly and the last crabgrass plant have died in the world's last zoo, when the oceans are dead and the land is paved over, we'll go on. Our marvellous vitality will carry us down, shoulder-to-buttock, gasping our own poisons and scrabbing for algae soup as the conveyor belt creaks by. Don't worry: We'll survive. Excuse me while I put out my garbage." (James K. Tiptree, Jr. 917).

"It is not so much that medicine has conquered disease, however real its achievements in this realm, but that it has succeeded in substituting sickness for death in the consciousness of the afflicted men." (Phillipe Aries 43)

There are many variants on this theme in science fiction and fantasy

"Speculative fiction ... treats immortality in what we might call a 'bodily spirituality. ... More often than not, SF and fantasy eliminate the body/spirit duality that is the basis for theological treatments of immortality ... if the body itself is not immortal, then the body-spirit that is the 'self' -- however fantastic that notion might be -- is. ... in opposition to theology, speculative fiction invites us to consider alternative connections between immortality, the body, and relatedness." (Lee 170).

"I will tell my story, and so contrive to pass some few hours of a long eternity, become so wearisome to me. For ever! Can it be? to live for ever! I have heard of enchantments, in which the victims were plunged into a deep sleep, to wake after a hundred years as fresh as ever: I have heard of the Seven Sleepers -- thus to be immortal would not be so burdensome: but, oh! the weight of never-ending time -- the tedious passages of the still-succeeding hours! " (Mary Shelley "The Immortal" 8)

"Yet the human spirit will not be denied. What our minds can conceive, our hands will eventually build." (Ben Bova)

"'I can walk in the raw without protection. I can tolerate levels of bombardment that would kill you. ... We have no men. We clone and engineer genes. After birth we undergo additional alteration. We have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land...." (Marge Piercy He, She, and It. 197-198)

"Somehow, she thought, she had dreamed, she had deluded herself that she had left behind death on earth." (Sinclair 111)

"Our grief is the agony that is generated by this effort to control. Its the conceptualizing of a 'perfect' Universe, one in which every thing and everyone is just as want them to be ... and then the resistance to the way they really are." (Welshons 89)

"Suffering used to be more common ... There was a purpose ... The belief has long died that suffering will be rewarded ... Suffering has lost its meaning." (Elizabeth Kubler-Ross)

"Ethnography, biography, history, psychotherapy -- these are the appropriate research methods to create knowledge about the personal world of suffering." (Arthur Kleinman The Illness Narratives)

"It is exactly because there is pain in your heart that communication is possible ... The ocean of suffering is immense, but it you turn around you can see the land ... Even while you have pain in your heart, you can enjoy many wonders of life ... the beautiful sunset, the smile of a child, the many flowers and trees... Without suffering you cannot grow, ... you cannot get thke peace and joy you deserve. Please do not run away from your suffering. Embrace and cherish it [but] to suffer is not enough. Please don't be imprisoned by your suffering. (Thich Nhat Hanh)