Remember that this week. You have never lived the seven days in front of you, and you will never live 'em again. Life is like a coin. Spend it any way you want to, but you can spend it only once. God would like you to learn from your experience in the wilderness. He wants to change your appetite, change your habits, change your style and, in the process, change your entire life.

Old age teaches you in a very unkind way that things won't necessarily get better. Not in this life. In fact, you can pretty much count on things degenerating. Being content is not a lack of ambition. It's being able to rest and relax and know that your worth doesn't come from what others think of you or even what you think of you.

Mortality is very brief but immeasurably important.

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it.

Thank God for life, True Belle said, and thank life for death.

It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both.

And how sweet that would have been: the two of them back by the milk shed, squatting by the churn, smashing cold, lumpy butter into their faces with not a care in the world.

Salt-sweet. Like not quite ripe strawberries covered with the light salt sweat of running days and hopping, skipping, jumping hours.

Flight from life does not exempt us from the law of age and death. The neurotic who tries to wriggle out of the necessity of living wins nothing and only burdens himself with a constant foretaste of aging and dying, which must appear especially cruel on account of the total emptiness and meaninglessness of his life.

Take care of your life and the Lord will take care of your death.

When the 30-year-old lawyer died he said to St. Peter, "How can you do this to me? - a heart attack at my age? I'm only 30." Replied St. Peter: "When we looked at your total hours billed we figured you were 95."

At any given moment life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, tending in a certain direction.