John

“Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist
in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without
being able to state or comprehend them.”
― Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

“He is certainly of an age to die.’ The sadness of the old; their banishment: most of them do not think that this age has yet come for them. I too made use of this cliché, and that when I was referring to my mother. I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative, a grandfather aged seventy and more. If I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead…

But it is not true.

You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. The knowledge that because of her age my mother’s life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky.

My mother encouraged one to be optimistic when, crippled with arthritis and dying, she asserted the infinite value of each instant; but her vain tenaciousness also ripped and tore the reassuring curtain of everyday triviality.

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“And people did this, just like you, you and me. These people did not come from another planet. [...] They were human beings, just like us. And it was not Hitler who arrested me, not Goering, not Goebbels. The grocer, the janitor, the tailor, the shoemaker, the baker, they suddenly got a uniform, a swastika armband, and there they were, the master race”
― Karl Stojka

“It's never too late to be who you might have been”
― George Eliot