Elly McCabe

“We’ve all got our own stories behind what happens. You can’t say someone who’s had a miscarriage at ten weeks is not as important as somebody that’s had a stillbirth at term, or a baby that’s lived for two days,’ she says, placing the wooden box back in the cupboard alongside the others. ‘There’s so much that’s misunderstood about pregnancy loss. The perception that you can just try again makes that little life seem not as important.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation Into the Death Trade

“We seem to have all the power and control in the world over our information, and at the same time no power or control at all. Our digital information could either be indelible, affecting how others see us and how people will remember us for evermore, or it could vanish, eliminating any evidence that we ever existed and rendering us victims of a twentyfirst century Dark Age. And while the era of information might have dangled the tantalising prospect of perpetuity in our faces, death has always found ways of defeating our fantasies of immortality. Everlasting life has always been an illusion, a mirage in the desert, and the digital age may not change that as much as one might expect.”
― Elaine Kasket, All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of your Personal Data

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“But mostly we want the suicidal, at least those who plan to die for existential reasons, to see that these great thinkers didn’t stop thinking at the point of killing God. Being mortal was not the end of the story. They continued to explore the implications of the existential givens, each concluding that life was very much worth living. They argued that we should celebrate life—rejoice in the freedom to build meaning and create our own essence. Life doesn’t end by accepting our mortality or our simple animal nature. In fact, the opposite is true. Acceptance is the beginning of writing one’s own personalised, and never to be repeated, story.”
― Rachel E. Menzies, Mortals: How the fear of death shaped human society