confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever touches.

The orchestra had ceased and were now climbing onto their chairs, with their instruments. The floral offerings flew; the coffin teetered. Catch it! a voice shouted. They sprang forward, but the coffin crashed heavily to the floor, coming open. The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath. Play something! the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; play! Play!

She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

Dajem ti sat, ne da se prise?aš vremena, ve? da bi ga ponekad mogao na trenutak zaboraviti, da ne izgubiš dah pokušavaju?i da ga osvojiš. Jer bitke se nikad ne dobijaju. ?ak se i ne biju. Bojno polje samo otkriva ?oveku njegovu ludost i o?ajanje, a pobeda je uvek samo iluzija filozofa i glupaka... Moglo bi se pomisliti da ?e se nesre?a jednog dana umoriti, ali onda samo vreme postaje naša nesre?a.

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

Any live man is better than any dead man.

And you came home? To die. Yes. To die? Yes. To die.

Addie: My father said that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead.

It's not men who cope with death; they resist, try to fight back and get their brains trampled out in consequence; where women just flank it, envelop it in one soft and instantaneous confederation of unresistance like cotton batting or cobwebs, already de-stingered and harmless, not merely reduced to size and usable but even useful like a penniless bachelor or spinster connection always available to fill an empty space or conduct an extra guest down to dinner.

each look burdened with youth's immemorial obsession not with time's dragging weight which the old live with but with its fluidity: the bright heels of all the lost moments of fifteen and sixteen.

I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?