Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death– ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it–it, the physical act.I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

Somebody, said Jacques, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour–and in the oddest places!–for the lack of it.