In My Time of Dying Quotes

“We’re all on the side of a mountain shocked by how fast it’s gotten dark; the only question is whether we’re with people we love or not. There is no other thing—no belief or religion or faith—there is just that. Just the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes, someone will be there to watch over us as we head out into that great, soaring night.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“The extra years that had been returned to me were too terrifying to be beautiful and too precious to be ordinary.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“I was young and had no idea the world killed people so casually.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“Man is the creator of God, and God is a concept and creation of Man. God is not existent. Piety was introduced by the impious. The fear of God was spread by the unafraid so that the people would be afraid of them in the end. Simple folk are cheated by the more cunning with the fabrication of God for their own oppression.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“You will know yourself best at that moment; you will be at your most real, your most honest, your most uncalculated. If you could travel back in time to make use of such knowledge during your life, you would become exactly the person you’d always hoped to be—but none of us do that. We don’t get that knowledge until it’s too late because then it can’t be tainted by vanity or pride or desire.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“There are more than thirty such parameters that must have almost the precise values that they do in order to permit a universe with life. The odds of that happening have been calculated to be ten to the negative 230—that is to say, one chance in a number that has 229 zeros after it. Randomly finding a specific grain of sand on the first try among all the grains on earth would be millions of millions of times more likely than the universe existing. And yet here we are.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“The price of getting to love somebody is having to lose them, I wrote. The price of getting to live is having to die.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“Eventually you will be all alone with doctors shrugging because they’ve run out of things to do, and the person you really are thumping frantically in your chest: the successes and catastrophes and affairs and hangovers and genuine loves and small betrayals and flashes of courage and the river of fear running beneath it all, and of course the vast stretches of wasted time that are part of even the most amazing life.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“Once I was blown up in a Humvee in Afghanistan and avoided injury because the bomb went off under the engine block instead of the crew compartment—a difference of about ten feet. I was jacked with adrenaline for the next few hours and then went careening into a depression that lasted days. I became paranoid about almost everything: where I sat, where I walked, what I sat behind. It was the ten feet that got me—the fact that “so much could be determined by so little,”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“If the ultimate proof of God is existence itself—which many claim to be the case—then a true state of grace may mean dwelling so fully and completely in her present moment that you are still reading your books and singing your songs when the guards come for you at dawn. The past and the future have no tangible reality in our universe; God’s creation exists moment by moment or not at all, and our only chance at immortality might lie in experiencing each of those moments as the stunning extravagance they actually are.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“My experience was sacred, I finally decided, because I couldn't really know death until it came for me. Without death, life does not require focus or courage or choice. Without death, life is just an extraordinary stunt that won't stop.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“You cannot visit a place of such violence and death and not expect it to follow you home. I thought; you cannot seek out another man’s suffering and not become part of it. One day it will paint your cieling and fill your mind and hijack your dreams. One day it will appear on hospital equipment above your head when there is nothing left other than to but hope Egbesu hasn’t decided you were lying the entire time.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“The ultimate transgression of everything that we take to be nature’s immutable laws might be something called delayed-choice quantum erasure, and any plausible theory of post-death reality would almost certainly have to involve something this outlandish. It has been well established that observing a double-slit experiment forces photons to act like particles rather than waves and go through one slit at a time, whereas unobserved photons go through both. And it has been well established that particles “entangled” at the quantum level affect each other instantaneously across any distance, including the entire universe. In an attempt to go back in time and erase reality, physicists combined those two phenomena into one experiment that tested entangled particles on the island of La Palma, in the Canaries archipelago, and on the island of Tenerife, eighty-eight miles distant. (For the brave or merely curious, a slightly abbreviated version of the technical description of this experiment is: “Linearly polarized single photons are sent by a polarization beamsplitter through an interferometer with two spatially separated paths associated with orthogonal S and P polarizations. The movable output beamsplitter consists of the combination of a half-wave plate, a polarization beamsplitter, an electro-optical modulator with its optical axis oriented at 22.5° from input polarizations, and a Wollaston prism. The two beams of the interferometer, which are spatially separated and orthogonally polarized, are first overlapped by the beamsplitter but can still be unambiguously identified by their polarization.”) That is to say, on one island, researchers shot a particle at the double slits, and it passed through both of them as an unobserved wave function. Eighty-eight miles away, via fiber optics cable, they then shot its entangled twin at double slits while observing it with a photon detector; as expected, its wave function collapsed, and it passed through only one slit. But now the universe had a problem: Entangled particles have to do the exact same thing, but the delayed choice had tricked them into acting differently. That was impossible. When researchers checked the strike plate of the first test, though, they found that the wave function had been retroactively collapsed by the second test and forced through a single slit. Quantum information had been erased.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“Depriving the brain of oxygen is known to cause cognitive distortions, tunnel vision, loss of consciousness, and an accompanying phenomenon, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood stream, is thought to trigger release of a psychedelic compound called DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine). The drug is chemically related to ayahuasca, the powerful “death vine” used by indigenous shamans in the Amazon basin, and it occurs naturally in spinal fluid. Endogenous DMT, as it is known, protects neurons from cell death during episodes of low oxygen or high carbon dioxide, which would make it a natural fit for near-death experiences.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“In end-stage hypothermia, the dying person may take off their clothes—“paradoxical undressing”—or curl up in a small, dark place, like a closet or under a bed. “Terminal burrowing,” as it is called, is thought to be initiated by a very primitive part of the brain associated with hibernating behavior in other animals.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“The life review is one of the most powerful and comforting of these visions. It is characterized by the conviction that you have sweeping knowledge of all things and can simultaneously reexperience your entire life. “When my expansion was over, I was everywhere, I was everything at the same time,” one woman recalled. “I was the sky, I was the ground, I was the trees, and I felt the wind blowing in my leaves, I was the sea and I was also my parents, my friends, people I had not met before but who, at that point, I knew because they were part of me.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“My father was a devoted rationalist who nevertheless believed that humans have souls, and that each soul briefly exists as its own entity, like a wave on the ocean. Souls are made of something we don’t understand yet, he said, and waves are just pulses of energy moving through a medium. My father believed that when we die, our souls are subsumed back into the vast soulmatter of the universe like waves subsumed back into the sea.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“We're all on the side of a mountain shocked by how fast it's gotten dark; the only question is whether we're with people we love or not. There is no other thing-- no belief or religion or faith-- there is just that. Just the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes, someone will be there to watch over us as we head out into that great, soaring night.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“Without death, life does not require focus or courage or choice. Without death, life is just an extraordinary stunt that won't stop.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“During the thirty seconds before and after death, the patient’s brain experienced a surge of gamma waves associated with memory retrieval, intense concentration, dissociative states, and dreaming. Laboratory rats experience the same surge of gamma waves when they die. The flood of memories experienced by Tyler Carroll as he drifted in and out of consciousness at a forward operating base in Afghanistan may be a trait common to all mammals, and the evolutionary advantage may simply lie in providing one last, compelling motivation to stay alive.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“The life review is one of the most powerful and comforting of these visions. It is characterized by the conviction that you have sweeping knowledge of all things and can simultaneously reexperience your entire life.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“A Dutch study of 344 people who survived cardiac arrest found that between 12 and 18 percent had deep and affecting experiences on the threshold of life: meeting dead loved ones, being ushered through a tunnel of light, existing outside of their bodies, and being filled with love and bliss.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“Every object is a miracle compared to nothingness and every moment an infinity when correctly understood to be all we’ll ever get. Religion does its best to impart this through a lifetime of devotion, but one good look at death might be all you need.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“The nurse who had told me I’d almost died came back for a visit about an hour later. She was middle-aged and gave the impression of being compassionate but also very businesslike, as if dying was not a particularly big deal and you might not want to be overly dramatic about it. She asked how I was doing. “I’m okay,” I lied. “But I can’t believe I almost died last night. It’s terrifying.” She considered me for a moment. “Instead of thinking of it as something scary,” she said, “try thinking of it as something sacred.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“The grandfather of this brilliant madness was Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, whose proof that gas molecules disperse in proportion to their temperature was foundational to all that followed. Boltzmann showed that molecular movement is simply determined by probability, which results in concentrations of molecules dispersing until they reach equilibrium with their environment. If you pour a potful of boiling water into a cold bath, hot water molecules spread out until they are evenly distributed and have slightly raised the overall bath temperature. Time cannot go backward for the same reason that boiling water can’t re-form in one corner of a cold bath and the dead cannot return to life: random probability will never re-concentrate those molecules back into their original form. The branch of physics pioneered by Boltzmann was called statistical mechanics, and it explained one of the fundamental laws of nature: the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as entropy.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“Doctors often try to get family members to come in if they think the patient will die, because seeing a trauma team desperately trying to save their loved one is enormously comforting later on. That is particularly true for parents. Barbara told Kohler that the ambulance crew had said Covid restrictions would keep her from going inside the building, but he overrode that. “I wouldn’t drive a hundred miles an hour,” he said to Barbara, “but if it were my wife, I would go as fast as I could.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“said, “Well then, you must go to MIT, in Boston. My son is there, and it’s the best school in the country.” My father had never heard of MIT but did know about Harvard, which was his preferred choice. And he would have gone there except that—according to him—the admissions director said his test scores were so high that Harvard would let him in even though they’d “reached their quota of Jews.” My father nodded, walked out, and enrolled at MIT.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“One of the core goals of life is survival; the other is meaning. In some ways, they are antithetical. Situations that have intense consequences are exceedingly meaningful—childbirth, combat, natural disasters—and safer situations are usually not. A round of golf is pleasant (or not) but has very little meaning because almost nothing is at stake. In that context, adrenaline junkies are actually “meaning junkies,” and danger seekers are actually “consequence seekers.” Because death is the ultimate consequence, it’s the ultimate reality that gives us meaning.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want one or not; refusing to think about death is its own kind of relationship.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“The existential charm of tree work is that your fate is entirely in your hands. The stakes are high—your life—but as with chess, there are no random events.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife