Cynthia

“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

“I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires to not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness. At such a time kind words are comforting and strengthening.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“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