Carolyn Heilbrun

"But had I stayed, I would have lost the chance to take control of my own ideas of rightness, to do the hard thing."

The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty
by Carolyn Heilbrun
The Dial Press, New York, 1997
Page 42

Heilbrun, Carolyn

"I find it powerfully reassuring now to think of life as "borrowed time." Each day one can say to oneself: I can always die; do I choose death or life? I daily choose life the more earnestly because it is a choice."

The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty
by Carolyn Heilbrun
The Dial Press, New York, 1997
Page 10

Joseph Roth

"Back then, before the Great War, when the incidents reported on these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a person lived or died. If a life was snuffed out from the host of the living, another life did not instantly replace it and make people forget the deceased. Instead, a gap remained where he had been, and both the near and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they saw this gap. If a fire devoured a house in a row of houses in a street, the charred site remained empty for a long time. For the bricklayers worked slowly and leisurely, and when the closest neighbors as well as casual passersby looked at the empty lot, they remembered the shape and the walls of the vanished house. That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically."

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
The Overlook Press, New York, 2002 [1932]
Page 112

Joseph Roth

"He became an army doctor. And he remained one. Life seemed to flow along more swiftly than thoughts. And before he even made a decision he was an old man."

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
The Overlook Press, New York, 2002 [1932]
Page 80