Quotes To Live By (page 140)
Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."What do we want?" I asked blurrily."Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted."What was that?"He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.
Michael Cunningham
The important fact is that for the man the act is eternal, and that for the brief space he has to live, he is already dead. He is already in a different world from ours. He has crossed the frontier. The important fact is that something is done which can not be undone-a possibility which none of us realize until we face it ourselves.
T. S. Eliot
And Yet the Books. And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings, That appeared once, still wet. As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn, And, touched, coddled, began to live. In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up, Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
Czeslaw Milosz