There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything. I sat down on the ground to avoid tipping over from the enormity of it all.

I have heard that a number of times in my life. "You guys should get over it, it happened a long time ago." You cannot get over it if you are still in the same circumstance as a consequence of what happened a hundred years ago. You cannot get over it if you are still in exactly the same relationship as you were a hundred years ago. Some try to keep their trees and some try to take them.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome — to be got over.

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.

Don’t worry. You may think you’ll never get over it. But you also thought it would last forever.

You can’t get over things you do to other people as easily as you get over things they do to you.

That life is long which answers life's great end.

Not how long you live, but how much you have lived, how much meaning your life has absorbed and passed on, is what matters.

Part of the beauty of being this age is that it doesn’t feel like it’s for ever. You can be overwhelmed, or you can go.

it’s possible to transcend anything that doesn’t kill you,

Remember death. Even for those who wield great power, life is brief. There is only one way to triumph over death, and that is by making our lives masterpieces. We must seize every opportunity to show kindness and to love fully.

He should have risked more. It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough. In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.

Life is that which must overcome itself again and again

Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on forever risked ending up in some as-yet-unglimpsed horror future. What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin? Better to die than risk that. Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.