But death's acquisitive instincts will win.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

I am sensible of the velocity of the moments, and entering that part of my head alert to the motion of the world I am aware that life was never perfect, never absolute. This bestows contentment, even a fearlessness.

Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head.

But death's acquisitive instincts will win.

This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over.

So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events - pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

In New York one lives in the moment rather more than Socrates advised, so that at a party or alone in your room it will always be difficult to guess at the long term worth of anything.

It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.

I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it.

Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can't think of any other place I'd rather die than here.

I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it - well, it is dangerous - but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work.

I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense.

Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste.

I have thousands of opinions still - but that is down from millions - and, as always, I know nothing.

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

Almost the first thing I did when I became ill was to buy a truly good television set.

I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.

Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been.

It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do.

God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle - or instruction.

I awake with a not entirely sickened knowledge that I am merely young again and in a funny way at peace, an observer who is aware of time's chariot, aware that some metamorphosis has occurred.

It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years.

To know that one has never really tried - that is the only death.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

When you break up, your whole identity is shattered. It's like death.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Death comes not to the living soul, nor age to the loving heart.

Death is a distant rumor to the young.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

I don't sit in the corner waiting for death: death has to pursue me. I'm going strong. I hope to reach 100 and ask for an extension, just like my grandmother did.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

I'm Irish. I think about death all the time.

I don't fear death because I don't fear anything I don't understand. When I start to think about it, I order a massage and it goes away.

The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.

Death doesn't frighten me; now I can think peacefully of ending a long life.

Death comes for us all. Even for kings he comes.

In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character.

It has ever been since time began, and ever will be, till time lose breath, that love is a mood - no more - to man, and love to a woman is life or death.

Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is.

In Goddess religion death is not feared, but is understood to be a part of life, followed by birth and renewal.

Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven.

Most of the debate over the cultures of death and life is about process. The debate focuses on the technology available to determine how we prolong life and how and when we end it.

I think that the core doctrines of Christianity - the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death-these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.