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“Dying wise: That's that antidote. Dying wise is the rumor around which all the attempts to control and manage and detoxify and assuage and domesticate and diminish dying swirl in our corner of the world. Dying wise is a thought unthought-a rumor-in a culture that does not believe in dying, and it will take about as much courage and wisdom as you can manage to do it. Dying wise is a life's work. Dying wise is the Rhythm, the Story, around which human life must swirl.”
― 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

“Gratitude needs practice, though. Gratitude for the things that don't seem to help, that aren't sought out or welcome-that's a demanding kind, and it is needed in hard times. A book about dying should have that kind of gratitude in it, bleeding through from the other side of sorrow. Drink enough of the sweet, strong mead of grief and love for being alive and it isn't long before you're sending a trembling, life-soaked greeting out to everything that came before you and to everything that will follow, a kind of love letter to the Big Story.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“We never know self-realization.

We are two abysses -- a well staring at the sky.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet