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“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

“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

“What if those people could stand on the shore watching their wake wash a bit of the shore away? And what if each of us could stay put long enough to see the rippling trail of everything we did rolling out behind us? What if we stopped long enough to see the long train of unintended consequence fan out from every innocently intended thing we did?

A taste for the consequence, for what endures: Maybe then there'd be a chance for things to be different.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul