Jack

“Dembe about Reddington:

More than anyone I've ever known, he's always been at peace with death. He says death is inevitable. It will come for us all. And that inevitability robs death entirely of its significance.

What matters are the things that are not inevitable.

The things we create. The things we find. The left we take when everything in our life is leading us right. How we live. I've always loved him for that. For his remarkable refusal to "go quietly into that good night."

Cooper:

The poem... by Dylan Thomas. Rage, rage Against the dying of the light

Dembe:

Yes.

Imagine. Raymond, a man surrounded by death in so many ways, so passionately committed to embracing life. He could have surrendered a thousand times over and Some End. But instead, he chooses to rage.

To rage against the dying of the light.

To rage against the bad guys that would do us all harm.

Rage to protect those people he loves.

To find moments of peace and joy... and fun...

( laughs )

...even though he knows the light is still dying.

To live a most passionate life, knowing it will still lead to the same inevitable end... is perhaps the most deeply moving choice one can make.

It is the lesson at the very core of my time with him. You never imagined this is how it would end.

But our time with him, our time together, was never about how it ended. It was about the adventure, about life, about Raymond constantly reminding us, showing us, imploring us... to rage.

To rage.”
― Dembe Zuma

“Fonny liked me so much that it didn't occur to him that he loved me. I liked him so much that no other boy was real to me. I didn't see them. I didn't know what this meant. But the waiting moment, which had spied us on the road, and which was waiting for us, knew.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing