The following are my favorite notes from Christopher Hitchens' Mortality.
To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
The absorbing fact about being mortally sick is that you spend a good deal of time preparing yourself to die with some modicum of stoicism (and provision for loved ones), while being simultaneously and highly interested in the business of survival.
Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. Ambrose Bierce
"Until you have done something for humanity," wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, "you should be ashamed to die."
It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.
If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.
Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.
If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
