Quote

I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief.

No doubt many people have the feeling that to talk about death at all is, in effect, to conjure it up mentally, to bring it closer in such a way that one has to face up to the inevitability of one's own eventual demise. So, to spare ourselves this psychological trauma, we decide just to try to avoid the topic as much as possible.

We're so afraid of death in our culture, but I think if we understand it better, then we'll appreciate the life we have more.

I think dead humans rising from their graves with little to no sense of who they were in their past lives to mindlessly roam the earth consigning others to the same fate would be a bit depressing.

If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.

For a culture that has such a problem with death, we seem to deal with it in a quite bizarre way. We see people shot, killed and blown up, and we find it funny and sexy and all those things. But, the reality of it is that every day people die, and people are really sad and they grieve and they go through a really difficult process with it.

Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.

Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old.

That past is still within our living memory, a time when neighbour helped neighbour, sharing what little they had out of necessity, as well as decency.

We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them.