Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage and death.
At different points in my life, I had grappled with the idea of going into the priesthood - in high school or law school. Where it ends, I'm not quite sure. Perhaps it ends with death, grappling with one's spirituality.
The inexorable compulsion of all things is towards health or destruction, life or death, and we hasten our joys or our woes to the logical extreme. It is urgent, therefore, that we be joyous if we wish to live.
The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island.
It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.
If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a 'peace conference', you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes.
To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life.
I grew up wanting to be a musician, but my parents were sure I would starve to death. So, they put me in physics and chemistry. That eventually blew up, and I got into radio.
I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth.
Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play, fully within the definition of work, and blissfully ignorant of the reality of death.
The story of Hosea and Gomer is the second most powerful picture of God's love in the Bible. Other than Christ's death, there is no greater picture of love.
What can separate us from the love of God? Not life, not death, nothing in the present, nothing in the future. Not angels, not demons nothing is able to stand between us and his loving plans because you can't stop them.
I don't mean to sound like a touchy-feely California type here, but I knew that I could finally get over the death of my father only by having kids of my own.
I taped the autopsy photos from Marilyn Monroe's death to my lunch box in fifth grade, and I would write stories in which someone inevitably died.
I don't like to talk about things unless I have to. I don't like to talk a scene to death or overanalyze it, especially if I feel like I have some way in on my own.
When I was 18, I couldn't wait to move away. I was like: 'If I ever have to come back here, I'll kill myself.' Glasgow seemed like failure and death to me back then, but not any more.
Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.
The die is set and Malcolm will not escape for the foolish talk he spoke against his benefactor, such a man, is worthy of death, and it would have been so, were it not for Muhammad's confidence that God would give him the victory over the enemies.
Living with AIDS is like always having the sword of Damocles over your head. The disease is scarier than death itself. The disease is so messy, so devastating, so pervasive. It robs you of everything you hold dear.
After I was assaulted in Egypt, I learned fear. I've just never been so scared in my life. I've never been so close to death.
And yet, I suppose you mourn the loss or the death of what you thought your life was, even if you find your life is better after. You mourn the future that you thought you'd planned.
