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“What does it take to get us to stand quietly, like somebody under a clear midnight sky, taking all of it in, stilled by the staggering pitch and pull of life? Things going well doesn't seem to help with this. Good fortune isn't persuasive on this matter, and it rarely gives people pause. It's when the news isn't good news; that's usually the time you find the limits of what you can bear to know. Then, maybe only then, you might be able to see that the waves of what you believed and did and held off from doing will still have their ripples, long after you're done. They outlast you. And this is tremendous news. When you are still enough for long enough, sometimes the river, the boat, and the waves and eddies-all of it-can turn into what you mean when you say, "My Life." If you can do that, you can change things. Your life becomes a little friendlier to the world, to what the world needs from you. It becomes a little friendlier to the endings of things too.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Our lowest infant mortality rate is bought in part by obliging infants with considerable birth abnormalities who would otherwise have died from them to live with them instead, often well into their childhoods and beyond, and by asking their families to learn how to do that. Our superb life span is purchased in part by extending old people's lives far beyond what their illness or their disease would have allowed, while still not entirely ridding them of that illness or disease. We should add a fourth record to the string of our achievements: I suspect that we also die the longest. We are not allowed to die on schedule. Often we do, but it isn't encouraged.”
― Stephen jenkinson , Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Seeing the end of your life is the birth of your ability to love being alive. It is the cradle of your love of life.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Sit on the shore while everything else goes on by you, and get through the low-level anxiety and the boredom and the feeling that you've already seen it all. That's a good time to learn. Here's what's there to see. Everything we do and don't do makes a wake, a legion of waves and troughs that pound the shores at the edges of what we mean, grinding away on the periphery of what we know. They go on, after the years in which we lived our individual lives are long passed. If we don't learn that simple, devastating, and redeeming detail of being alive-that what we do, all the jangle of our declarations and defeats, lasts longer than we ourselves do, that the past isn't over-then the parade of our days stands to indict much more than it bequeaths. This is something that we have to learn now. Many of us count on our best intent winning the day or getting us off the hook of personal or ecological consequence. It hasn't, and it won't.”
― Stephen Jenkinson , Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul