“A man condemned to immediate execution will not think about the growth of his estate, or about achieving glory, or about the victory of one group over another, or about the discovery of a new planet. But one minute before his death a man may wish to console an abused person, or help an old person to stand up, or to put a bandage on someone’s injury, or to repair a toy for a child.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 46)
“It’s not at all that we have too short a time to live, but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long enough, and it’s given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well. But when it’s poured down the drain of luxury and neglect, when it’s employed to no good end, we’re finally driven to see that it has passed before we even recognized it passing. And so it is—we don’t receive a short life, we make it so.”
Seneca, On the Brevity of Life, The Daily Stoic (Page 382)
“In the evening of our lives we shall be examined in love.”
St. John of the Cross, via Sunbeams (Page 154)
“Most of us are afraid of dying. But sometimes this fear begs the question: To protect what exactly? For a lot of people the answer is: hours of television, gossiping, gorging, wasting potential, reporting to a boring job, and on and on and on. Except, in the strictest sense, is this actually a life? Is this worth gripping so tightly and being afraid of losing? It doesn’t sound like it.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 379)
“If death is truly the end, then what is there exactly to fear? For everything from your fears to your pain receptors to your worries and your remaining wishes, they will perish with you. As frightening as death might seem, remember: it contains within it the end of fear.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 376)
“We’ve discovered that the earth isn’t flat; that we won’t fall off its edges, and our experience as a species has changed as a result. Maybe we’ll soon find out that the self isn’t ‘flat’ either, and that death is as real and yet as deceptive as the horizon; that we don’t fall out of life either.”
Seth, Jane Roberts’ Seth Speaks, via Sunbeams (Page 151)
“Talking about the ones we’ve lost keeps them alive.”
Katherine, via Between Two Kingdoms (Page 309)
“We have an irrational fear of acknowledging our own mortality. We avoid thinking about it because we think it will be depressing. In fact, reflecting on mortality often has the opposite effect—invigorating us more than saddening us. Why? Because it gives us clarity.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 361)
“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day… The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”
Seneca, Moral Letters, via The Daily Stoic (Page 349)
“For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 122)
“We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ death appears in the plotline.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 119)
“Until death, it is all life.”
Miguel De Cervantes, via Between Two Kingdoms
Between Two Kingdoms [Book]
![Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad [Book]](https://movemequotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/kingdoms.jpeg)
Book Overview: A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
“But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here—the extraordinary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.”
Annie Dillard, via Sunbeams (Page 126)
“The core of life is about losses and deaths both subtle and catastrophic, over and over again, and also about loving and rising again. The cancer, the car accident—these are extreme experiences of other trajectories we’re on—aging, the loss of love, the death of dreams, the child leaving home. Grief and gladness, sickness and health, are not separate passages. They’re entwined and grow from and through each other, planting us, if we’ll let them, more profoundly in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 68)
“Millions of persons long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy afternoon.”
Susan Ertz, via Sunbeams (Page 75)
“Every day matters. The awareness of our mortality can help us pursue a goal. We all have a limited amount of time on earth. Those who live in active awareness of this reality are more likely to identify goals and make progress toward them. Or to put it another way: Everyone dies, but not everyone truly lives.”
Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 268)