Let people who do not know what to do with themselves in this life, but fritter away their hope for eternal life. If one loves intensely, the time comes when death seems bliss… The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation… As one deserves a good night’s sleep, one also deserves to die. Why should I hope to wake again? To do what I have not done in the time I’ve had? All of us have so much more time than we use well… Lives are spoiled and made rotten by the sense that death is distant and irrelevant… [B]ut it makes for a better life if one has a rendezvous with death… There is nothing morbid about thinking and speaking of death. Those who disparage honesty do not know its joys.

pp160