The World Motivation
What you know isn't nearly as important as who you know. Who will miss you. Who you will miss.
“How do you know she’s the one for you?”
“When it rains," her father said "it pours.”
“Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.”
“Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.”
“Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.”
“It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.”
“Every man believes to some extent that the world began when he was born and, at the moment of leaving it, suffers at having to let the Universe remain unfinished.”
“Death is fugitive; even when you're watching for it, the actual instant somehow slips between your fingers. You don't get that sudden drop of the head you see in movies. Instead you simply sit there, waiting for something to happen, and all at once you realize you've missed it.”
“My story will be over soon. But it's not something to be sad about. As we count up the memories from one journey, we head off on another. Remembering those who went ahead. Remembering those who will follow after. And someday, we will meet all those people again, out beyond the horizon.”
“If I'm to die a mortal, why shouldn't the same fate be given to all, no matter how long they've lived or how important they think they are? All things must eventually come to an end.”
“That we're going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, That's why, in some ways, it's as if we were born dead.”
“Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.”