Quotes & Sayings About Understanding Life And Death

When we ponder the vastness of the universe and eternity, we are closer to understanding the role of death in the mysterious life we are all experiencing. Through these realizations, greater acceptance of the inevitability of death positions us to be happier in our lives. After my journey through these ideas I feel strongly that happiness and a deeper understanding of death are linked phenomena that offer a fuller existence. — Loren Mayshark

To build a church when a school house is needed is to perpetrate a theft upon education.
To build a church when a hospital is needed is to take from the parched lips of the sick the cup of relief and from the suffering the merciful hand of help.
When the object of man's conduct will be to improve the conditions of his fellow man and not the appeasement of a mythical God, he will become more understanding and more indulgent of the frailties, mistakes, and action of others, and by the same token he will become more appreciative of their efforts.
He will develop a greater consciousness to avoid mistakes and to prevent injury. Life and its living will take on a greater significance, and our efforts and energies will be devoted to creating as much joy and happiness as possible for all living creatures. — Joseph Lewis

The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that. — F.K. Preston

I wrote that certain things were leaving me nauseated. I said that judges made me feel that way. Not most of them but all of them. I said that you for example, the judge I'm writing this to, made me feel nauseated. The nausea came from understanding that people produced by every conceivable advantage got to decide whether someone like Jalen lived or died and what was worse was they never fucking seemed to decide that the person should live, that a person's life, any person, was more important than whether some fat fuck at a country club thought you were hard enough on crime or whether you continue to get sufficient reelection campaign contributions you worthless retarded piece of shit. Why should you be allowed to decide anything beyond what you have for lunch you mental infant? — Sergio De La Pava

It is good to have a reminder of death before us, for it helps us to understand the impermanence of life on this earth, and this understanding may aid us in preparing for our own death. He who is well prepared is he who knows that he is nothing compared with Wakan-Tanka, who is everything; then he knows that world which is real. — Black Elk

If you're afraid of death, I would say, either fight for your life or come to grips with the fact you may not make it. And in doing that there shouldn't be bitterness. There should be a celebration. There should be an understanding of how lucky you are. That's how I feel. — Robby Benson

Somehow, the telling of all this rinsed my mind clean and left me able to think clearly once more. By gathering and sorting my own feelings so, I was finally able to fashion a scale on which I could weigh my father's nature and find a balance between my disgust for him and an understanding of him; my guilt in the matter of his death against the debt he owed me for the manner of my life. At the finish of it, I felt free of him, and I was able to think calmly once more. Elinor — Geraldine Brooks

Watch this, Larry. The seeds I saved from last year bring forth plants this year. It's a death, burial, and resurrection. It's this way with the sun also. It comes up in the morning and brings us light all the day long. But in the evening it goes down. Is that the end of the sun? No... It comes up the very next day. Death, burial, and resurrection."
"I never saw it like that, Charlie. Tell me more."
"See Larry, let's go deeper with that. Just for instance, something must die for something to live. You and I eat live substance--whether it is corn or beans, it's a life. That life dies to give us life. Now watch this, Larry. If that works with the physical; then it also works in the spiritual. Jesus Christ had to die to give us life... — Jerrel C. Thomas

I said that the question about death, and more precisely, the confusion about death, lies at the very heart of human understanding, and in the final analysis, the relation of man to life, that which we call his worldview, is ultimately determined by his relationship to death.
All of civilization seems to be permeated with a passionate obsession to stifle this fear of death and the sense of the meaninglessness of life that oozes out of it like a slow-dripping poison. What is this intense conflict with religion, if nothing other than a mindless attempt to root out of human consciousness the memory and concern with death and consequently the question: why do I live in this brief and fragile life? — Alexander Schmemann

Then he asked me which one I thought was most likely to happen. I wish I knew. I really do. But I don't. You'd think that after living with these people for fifteen years I'd know a little something about them. But right now I feel like I don't know my parents at all. I guess
when you get down to it, I've never really thought about them as people. They've always been my parents. Now I have to think about them as people with feelings. What a pain.
The funny thing is, I bet they feel the same way. — Michael Thomas Ford

God is our Creator. He is loving, holy, and just. One day he will execute perfect justice against all sin. People are made in the image of God. We are beautiful and amazing creatures with dignity, worth, and value. But through our willful, sinful rebellion against God, we have turned from being his children to his enemies. Still, all people have the capacity to be in a restored loving relationship with the living God. Christ is the Son of God, whose sinless life gave him the ability to become the perfect sacrifice. Through his death on the cross, he ransomed sinful people. Christ's death paid for the sins of all who come to him in faith. Christ's resurrection from the dead is the ultimate vindication of the truth of these claims. The response God requires from us is to acknowledge our sin, repent, and believe in Christ. So we turn from sin, especially the sin of unbelief, and turn to God in faith, with the understanding that we will follow him the rest of our days. — J. Mack Stiles

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.
The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"
And the answer: "Where was man? — William Styron

To gain a true understanding of human experience, we must understand both our conscious and our unconscious selves, and how they interact. Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences our conscious experience of the world in the most fundamental of ways: how we view ourselves and others, the meanings we attach to the everyday events of our lives, our ability to make the quick judgment calls and decisions that can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and the actions we engage in as a result of all these instinctual experiences. — Leonard Mlodinow

The experience of losing a loved one impels us toward a deeper understanding of life. Everyone fears and is saddened by death. That is natural. But by struggling to overcome the pain and sadness that accompanies death, we become sharply aware of the dignity and preciousness of life and develop the compassion to share the sufferings of others as our own. — Daisaku Ikeda

There are times ... when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it's unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it's higher truth.
... When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. — Mary Doria Russell

Whatever you do in life will be insignificant. but it is very important that you do it because, You can't know; You can't ever really know the meaning of your life, and you don't need to. Just know that your life has a meaning. Every life has a meaning; whether it lasts one-hundred years or one-hundred seconds.Every life and every death changes the world in its own way. Gandhi knew this. He knew his life would mean something to someone, somewhere, somehow. And he knew with as much certainty that he could never know that meaning. He understood that enjoying life should be of much greater concern than understanding it. And so do I. You can't know. So don't take it for granted; but don't take it too seriously. Don't postpone what you want. Don't leave anything misunderstood. Make sure the people you care about know. Make sure they know how you really feel. Because just like that it could end. — Will Fetters

We can learn so much about the living, according to how they treat their dead. And we can see the true colours of people coming out, when we observe how they act and react, to the circumstances that come about after the death of a loved one. Lastly, we learn about the things most important in our lives, when we experience the loss called death. It is extraordinary how death can give back so much to life and to the living. — C. JoyBell C.

The universe is just there; that's the only way a Fedaykin can view it and remain the master of his senses. The universe neither threatens nor promises. It holds things beyond our sway: the fall of a meteor, the eruption of a spiceblow, growing old and dying. These are the realities of this universe and they must be faced regardless of how you feel about them. You cannot fend off such realities with words. They will come at you in their own wordless way and then, then you will understand what is meant by "life and death." Understanding this, you will be filled with joy. - MUAD'DIB TO HIS FEDAYKIN — Frank Herbert

God is alpha and omega in the great world: endeavor to make him so in the little world; make him thy evening epilogue and thy morning prologue; practice to make him thy last thought at night when thou sleepest, and thy first thought in the morning when thou awakest; so shall thy fancy be sanctified in the night, and thy understanding rectified in the day; so shall thy rest be peaceful, thy labors prosperous, thy life pious, and thy death glorious. — Francis Quarles

In engineering or medical science, a deep understanding of uncertainty can be a matter of life and death. In politics, over-confidence is often the norm; uncertainty is seen as weakness when really it is a vital part of decision making. In this respect, science delivers an important lesson in humility. In — Brian Cox

Did the dead still want things? Or was death simply a letting go of all that is held so tightly in life - an understanding of the temporal and shallow nature of the human matters of possession, greed, desire, justice? — Lisa Wingate

How do you react when your own government lies to you systematically about life-and-death questions? As I have noted earlier, the answer is political action in the state legislatures, and one weapon in the hands of the public is an understanding of the pseudo-science and pseudo-epidemiology represented by articles like this one. — Harris L Coulter

The reality of the Life Review is becoming part of our every day understanding. We know that after death, we have to look at our lives again; and we're going to agonize over every missed opportunity, over every case in which we failed to act. This knowledge is contributing to our determination to pursue every intuitive image that comes to mind, and keep it firmly in awareness. We're living life in a more deliberate way. We don't want to miss a single important event. We don't want the pain of looking back later and realizing that we blew it, that we failed to make the right decisions. — James Redfield

When we are at last freed from the body that has defined and dominated our understanding of ourselves for so long, the karmic vision of one life is completely exhausted, but any karma that might be created in the future has not yet begun to crystallize. So what happens in death is that there is a "gap" or space that is fertile with vast possibility; it is a moment of tremendous, pregnant power where the only thing that matters, or could matter, is how exactly our mind is. Stripped of a physical body, mind stands naked, revealed startlingly for what it has always been: the architect of our reality. So — Sogyal Rinpoche

How to raise this dead level of theistic belief is really a matter of life and death for all denominations. Therefore their tolerance; but it is a tolerance not of understanding; but of weakness. — Emma Goldman

This wonderful gray of acceptance resides between the extremes of black and white thinking; looking for serenity, explore the gray. Part of that acceptance is understanding that life is hard and involves life and death. Part of that acceptance is that I am responsible for my actions. — David W. Earle

We're not gods, Julia. We're helpers. That's all. People have called us terrible things in the past. But that was only because they didn't understand us. That understanding is for the future, a time not long from now. You may live to see it. Then perhaps you can work openly, but for now, keep your gifts to yourself. Never flaunt your abilities. Never think you hold the power of life and death. Only God has that power. When it's a person's time, nothing can save them. — Christopher Pike

People sometimes find Buddhism pessimistic, saying there is too much talk about death. It's essential to understand that Buddhists don't contemplate death because they are morbid or depressed; they focus on death, mortality, and human frailty as a means of better understanding and appreciating life. — Lama Surya Das

He did not torture himself with vain attempts to hold his brain as a mirror to his heart, that he might read his heart there. The heart is deaf and dumb and blind, but it has more in it - more life and blessedness, more torture and death - than any poor knowledge-machine of a brain can understand, or even delude itself into the fancy of understanding. — George MacDonald

Grace is what matters. In anything. Especially life, especially growth, tragedy, pain, love, death. About people, that's what matters. That's a quality I admire very greatly. It keeps you from reaching for the gun too quickly; it keeps you from destroying things too foolishly; it sort of keeps you alive and keeps you open for more understanding. — Jeff Buckley

We lose the understanding that death always begets life of some sort, and that life is always an opportunist, persistently standing ready to build something out of the smoldering ashes and raise something up out of the tangled carnage. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die ... His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such. He gives way without reserve to his most powerful passion and the wishes it engenders. — Allan Bloom

Grief is a solitary journey. No one but you knows how great the hurt is. No one but you can know the gaping hole left in your life when someone you know has died. And no one but you can mourn the silence that was once filled with laughter and song. It is the nature of love and of death to touch every person in a totally unique way. Comfort comes from knowing that people have made the same journey. And solace comes from understanding how others have learned to sing again. — Helen Steiner Rice

Answers seemed to float through the space around him. It was about love. It was about getting handed at conception a gift that sets you apart from everyone and you spend your whole life drifting through the margins of time, not understanding hours like everyone else seems to: glancing at wristwatches, checking timetables - you hardly know what it is people are trying to accomplish when they go through their days: morning, noon, evening, night. Wake up and sleep and wake up. This was about family, how blood superseded death; it was about trying your hardest, it was about snow. — Anthony Doerr

We are just too blinded by the phrase, "grow old together" and learning its meaning from hopeless movies and novels that glorify undying love and unbelievable understanding. Don't you think?
Reality is...
Love dies. People change. And we grow old together in present. Today, tomorrow, and every day after that.
It's not about eternity. It's not till death do us part.
It's about today. This day. And I believe only in today.
So, come! Let's grow old together today! — Mansi Laus Deo

[F]rom my years of understanding ... I happily chose this kind of life in which I yet live [i.e., unmarried], which I assure you for my own part hath hitherto best contented myself and I trust hath been most acceptable to God. From the which if either ambition of high estate offered to me in marriage by the pleasure and appointment of my prince ... or if the eschewing of the danger of my enemies or the avoiding of the peril of death ... could have drawn or dissuaded me from this kind of life, I had not now remained in this estate wherein you see me. But so constant have I always continued in this determination ... yet is it most true that at this day I stand free from any other meaning that either I have had in times past or have at this present. — Elizabeth I

And now the thought came to me that I lived much of my life through the pages of books as well. That perhaps I, too, was only a paper figure. A cut-out, or silhouette. Flat.
I always thought I knew the shape of my life. Of course I thought I knew about life, thought I knew all I needed - or wanted - to know. And yet, like the opening left when a burning star falls from its perch, now an unexpected hole was left in what was once a solid curtain of understanding... ( )... Sitting under the cold stars, I understood that it was death that made me recognize life, and the existence, or pherhaps the non-existence of my own beeing. — Linda Holeman

In the solitude of death, the young child or the mature adult can turn to another for comfort without feeling childish or dependent. The newly emancipated, self-sufficient young adult may have too much personal pride to allow himself to accept the support and the understanding he so desperately needs as he moves toward death. The specific emotional reaction of the newly mature young man to the prospect of personal death is RAGE. He feels that life is completely within his grasp so that death above all else is the great ravisher and destroyer. These mature young men who have worked, trained and striven to reach self-confidence and self-sufficiency now appreciate what they can do and what they can enjoy and that suddenly it will all end. They are so ready to live, to them death is a brutal, personal attack, an unforgivable insult, a totally unacceptable event. — Ronald J. Glasser

We must love because we are loved by God. We must be conscious of death if we are to have a proper understanding of life. We must struggle in order to grow, but without falling into the trap of the power we gain through that struggle, because we know that power is worthless. Finally, we must accept that our eternal soul is, at this moment, caught in the web of time with all its opportunities and its limitations. — Paulo Coelho

He comes down next to me, and when I hold out my hand, he takes it. Our fingers lace together. And in that feeling, that perfect feeling of our hands and fingers pressed together, I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him about Josh, and his sister, Emily. I want to tell him about tall, crazy Gert. I want to tell him about bridges and funerals, and most of all, maps. More than anything else, I want to tell him about myself. I want to tell him that I know what things look like from above now. There's so much I want to tell him, because I know he'll understand. — Shawn Klomparens

What is clear is that he was self-aware and prepared to live with unresolved contradictions, approaching the crises of life with a sense of hope tempered by a recognition that he, at least, was not fated to live to see the end of heartbreak, failure, disappointment, and death. "We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy," he had written - as the Heart, not the Head. "It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce." Jefferson believed that the future could be better than the past. He knew, though, that life was best lived among friends in the pursuit of large causes, understanding that pain was the price for anything worth having. — Jon Meacham

Sometimes, stopping a purposeful journey can be very appealing, but that can also be as deadly as death. Pursue with tenacity, strive through the adversities, understand the vicissitudes of life and dare to be a conqueror no matter what, with fortitude and understanding! There is always a moment in a purposeful journey when giving up speaks clearly and convincingly, but when you fix your eyes on the end point, you shall surely see life after all the ups and downs! Don't kill your dreams! Awake! Arise and go! Never give up! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The baby, not too young to start knowing the ledge, the cold truth, the life-and-death facts of it all. 'What kind of heaven is that, you can't have your records?' The baby, understanding perhaps it was purely rhetorical, made no attempt to answer this question. — Michael Chabon

Books had rescued me when i most needed saving... Books were smarter than me and words inspired me... to try something new, charge forward without a clear understanding of what would happen next, because "given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too deeply?"
In the end, Thoreau, Whitman, Hafiz, and a dozen other writers put me up to the task of seeing if I dared to "live a life worth living. — Dee Williams

When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death. — Clarence Darrow

I will keep faith with death in my heart ... For the sake of goodness, for the sake of love, Let no man's heart be ruled by death ... The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the .emotions, as the inviolable condition of life. — Thomas E. Mann

You don't understand that one can be an atheist, one can not know whether God exists or why, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature but in history, and that in present-day understanding it was founded by Christ, that its foundation is the Gospel. And what is history? It is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming. Hence the discovery of mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, hence the writing of symphonies. It is impossible to move on in that direction without a certain uplift. These discoveries call for spiritual equipment. The grounds for it are contained in the Gospel. They are these. First, love of one's neighbor, that highest form of living energy, overflowing man's heart and demanding to be let out and spent, and then the main component parts of modern man, without which he is unthinkable
namely, the idea of the free person and the idea of life as sacrifice. — Boris Pasternak

The unawakened mind tends to make war against the way things are. To follow a path with heart, we must understand the whole process of making war within ourselves and without, how it begins and how it ends. War's roots are in ignorance. Without understanding we can easily become frightened by life's fleeting changes, the inevitable losses, disappointments, the insecurity of our aging and death. Misunderstanding leads us to fight against life, running from pain or grasping at security and pleasures that by their nature can never be satisfying. — Jack Kornfield

I often took him as one of God's little jokes on me. When I was in desperate trouble, what saved me from a fate worse than death? To what do I owe my life? Was it love, affection, understanding, friends, wisdom? No no no. It was a man who looks like a poor copy of Walt Disney, drives pink Cadillacs, wears baby-blue alligator shoes, and appears to have the emotional depth of a slightly retarded potato. — Mark Vonnegut

If there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the nobility of our memory of them. With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution of happiness, strength, and understanding to my being remains to sustain me in an altered world. — Helen Keller

Every death of those you love is the death also of so many shared memories and understanding, of a now irretrievable part of your own life. — Richard Flanagan

Death is a terrifying experience... It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those---those able to turn to them---from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the 'ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds. — Ricardo Piglia

Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. — Epicurus

The Sacrament of the Body of the Lord puts the demons to flight, defends us against the incentives to vice and to concupiscence, cleanses the soul from sin, quiets the anger of God, enlightens the understanding to know God, inflames the will and the affections with the love of God, fills the memory with spiritual sweetness, confirms the entire man in good, frees us from eternal death, multiplies the merits of a good life, leads us to our everlasting home, and re-animates the body to eternal life — Thomas Aquinas

No man of common sense will value a woman the less, for not giving herself up at the first attack, or for not accepting his proposal without enquiring into his person or character; on the contrary, he must think her the weakest of all creatures in the world, as the rate of men now goes; in short, he must have a very contemptible opinion of her capacities, nay, even of her understanding, that having but one cast for her life, shall cast that life away at once, and make matrimony like death, be a leap in the dark. — Daniel Defoe

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me. — Franz Kafka

Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone. — Marion Woodman

I am not knocking advances that provide a healthier life and alleviate suffering or unnecessary premature death. I am advocating inclusion of education on end-of-life matters and the promotion of understanding, conversation, and planning. — Lisa J. Shultz

When there is a total understanding of need, the outward and the inner, then desire is not a torture. Then it has a quite different meaning, a significance far beyond the content of thought and it goes beyond feeling, with its emotions, myths and illusions. With the total understanding of need, not the mere quantity or the quality of it, desire then is a flame and not a torture. Without this flame life itself is lost. It is this flame that burns away the pettiness of its object, the frontiers, the fences that have been imposed upon it. Then call it by whatever name you will, love, death, beauty. Then it is there without an end. — Allan W. Anderson

Since the death of Nikola Tesla in 1943, his life has deserved a worthy biography. Bernard Carlson has delivered that in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, which portrays Tesla as intensely human ... Anyone, whether simply an interested reader or a professional historian, engineer, or physicist, will finish Tesla with a deepened understanding of his world, character, and accomplishments. — Robert Rosenberg

When you haven't yet had your heart really broken, the gospel isn't about death and rebirth. It's about life and more life. It's about hope and possibility and a brighter future. And it is, certainly, about those things.
But when you've faced some kind of death - the loss of someone you loved dearly, the failure of a dream, the fracture of a relationship - that's when you start understanding the central metaphor. When your life is easy, a lot of the really crucial parts of Christian doctrine and life are nice theories, but you don't really need them. When, however, death of any kind is staring you in the face, all of a sudden rebirth and new life are very, very important to you. — Shauna Niequist

You won't understand life and death until you're ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die. — Brad Warner

I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty. I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure. I trusted God to sustain the world although I could not say for sure how that happened. I trusted God to hold me and those I loved, in life and in death, without giving me one shred of conclusive evidence that it was so. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Lacking strength beauty hates the understanding for asking of her what it cannot do but the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Most people don't why they are born or why they die. They have no understanding of the forces in life that pull them and push them to their death and another rebirth in this or another world. — Frederick Lenz

What I failed to see was that, by ending my life, I would cause interminable pain to my family and friends. I could not understand the heartbreak it would cause those around me. Nor did I consider that my brother, Joseph, might live the rest of his life in continual rage, or that my sister, Libby, might shut herself off from the world and fall into perpetual depression, silence, and sadness mistakenly blaming themselves for my death as many family members do when they lose someone they love to suicide. I certainly held no understanding of the enormous pain my mother and father would suffer because they lost their oldest son in such a terrifying and devastating way. They would not have a chance to watch me mature, marry, and perhaps have children. Instead, all of their hopes, aspirations, and dreams for me would be destroyed with my decision to end my life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. — Kevin Hines

Understanding comes with life. As a man grows he sees life and death, he is happy and sad, he works, plays, meets people - sometimes it takes a lifetime to acquire understanding, because in the end understanding simply means having sympathy for people. — Rudolfo Anaya

Whether you realize it or not, you are a theologian. You come to a book like this with a working theology, an existing understanding of God. Whether you are an agnostic or a fundamentalist - or something in between - you have a working theology that shapes and informs the way you think and live. However, I suspect that you are reading this book because you're interested in examining your theology more closely. You are open to having it challenged and strengthened. You know that theology - the study of God - is more than an intellectual hobby. It's a matter of life and death, something that affects the way you think, the decisions you make each day, the way you relate to God and other people, and the way you see yourself and the world around you. — Michael S. Horton

You saved me from the slowest, most terrible death I could ever envision. You risked your life, your freedom to protect my family. As far as I am concerned, that makes you family." Rosie's mouth set into a line and her hazel eyes were uncomfortably kind, full of a deep understanding that wrapped around me like a physical presence. "Family," she continued. "Family don't give up on family just because things get dangerous. Azalea risked her life for you, same as you'd risk your life for her. Don't belittle that choice by pretending you could make it for her. You don't have that right. — Annie Bellet