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1 " After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings. "
― Richard Dawkins
2 " I shall not waste any of our brief time together flattering your ego, as others have done before, with all this nonsense about skills and talents that do not help, or worse, that you do not actually possess "
3 " Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth. "
― Brent Green , Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss
4 " The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle to in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened. "
― Roberto Mangabeira Unger , The Religion of the Future
5 " And in this moment of pale dawn in the hours before we leave California, I finally realize what has been the hardest thing for me about Matt’s death. It isn’t that I lost a brother, like Frankie, or a son, like Aunt Jayne and Uncle Red. The hardest thing is that I’ll never know exactly what I lost, how much it should hurt, how long I should keep thinking about him. He took that mystery with him when he died, and a hundred thousand one-sided letters in my journal wouldn’t have brought me any closer to the truth than I was the night I pressed my fingers to the sea glass he wore around his neck and kissed him back. For over a year, the letters were my only connection to him; the only evidence that I didn’t imagine our brief time as other. When I first saw my journal helplessly floating on the waves, I felt a loss so immediate and overwhelming it was like being back in the hospital lobby when the doctor told us they couldn’t fix him. One minute, the journal was in my hands, soft and familiar and real; the next minute, it was gone. Just like Matt. And just like Matt, I need to let it go. "
― Sarah Ockler , Twenty Boy Summer
