Lights Out, Sweet Dreams
Collage, Mixed Media
by Jessica J. Johnston | April 2012
Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.
— Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
In his grief he might forget to begin work: but when he began, it was difficult to get him to stop. He had pulled out of that grief, eventually—out from under the suffocating weight of it. Suffering had formed him: made him silent and deliberate, thoughtful: deep. Generous and kind and attentive, although he had been that before.
— Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist
A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.
— Arthur Schopenhauer