Being Mortal

A great passage I read in Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon:

"Who could in all seriousness want to be immortal? Who would like to live for all eternity? How boring and stale it must be to know that what happens today, this month, this year, doesn't matter: endless more days, months, years will come. Endless, literally. If that was how it was, would anything count?...It is death that gives the moment its beauty and its horror."

And then this: "So the fear of death might be described a...