Ah, I often think it's wi' th' old folks as it is wi' the babbies, said Mrs. Poyser; they're satisfied wi' looking, no matter what they're looking at. It's God A'mighty's way o' quietening 'em, I reckon, afore they go to sleep.

I thought we should never part with that while we lived; everything is going away from us; the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning!

In the midst of life we are in death" — how the present moment is all we can call our own for works of mercy, of righteous dealing, and of family tenderness. All very old truths — but what we thought the oldest truth becomes the most startling to us in the week when we have looked on the dead face of one who has made a part of our own lives. For

There's Jeremy Taylor's 'Holy Living and Dying' among 'em. I read

'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'

Time is a gift and a threat because we are bodily creatures. We only come into existence through the bodies of others, but that very body destines us to death. We must be born and we must die.

Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

Our time for this life is nothing other than a race to death.

That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.

If I was dead, I wouldn't know I was dead. That's the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.

He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.