Death Quote by Anna Quindlen — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.”

“He died and the whole Soviet Union followed. Revmira's country, her young face, the entire course of her life had changed. Since she started at the hospital, she had sat next to more than a hundred persons to help them go, so she knew death well: the release of breath, the rattle, the calm. Her parents went the same way, one after the other. And she missed them. She had resigned herself a long time ago to missing all the people who left her.”

“Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.”

“Now hollow fires burn out to black,”

“She remembered the first time she’d seen him at the Menagerie. He paid Tante Heleen for information—stock tips, political pillow talk, anything the Menagerie’s clients blabbed about when drunk or giddy on bliss. He never visited Heleen’s girls, though plenty would have been happy to take him up to their rooms. They claimed he gave them the shivers, that his hands were permanently stained with blood beneath those black gloves, but she’d recognized the eagerness in their voices and the way they tracked him with their eyes.”

“The only advantage of knowledge is that it can justify suffering.”