I was once being interviewed by Barbara Walters in three segments, all at once, though they were to be run on three separate days.

In between two of the segments, she asked me how many books I had written, and I told her. She said, "Don't you ever want to do anything but write?"

"No", I said.

"Don't you want to go hunting? Fishing? Dancing? Hiking?"

And I said, "No! No! No! and No!"

She said, "But what would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?"

I said, "Type faster."

Isaac Asimov
Asimov Laughs Again  (1992)

  
[A street in Rome.]

Murellus (to the commoners}:

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
...
                          Many a time and oft
Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day with patient expectation ...

William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, 1.1.34-40

  
Descent into Hades. — I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and will often be there again; and I have not sacrificed only rams to be able to talk with the dead, but have not spared my own blood as well.

There have been four pairs who did not refuse themselves to me, the sacrificer: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I have had to come to terms when I have wandered long alone, from them will I accept judgement, to them will I listen when in doing so they judge one another. Whatever I say, resolve, cogitate for myself and others: upon these eight I fix my eyes and see theirs fixed upon me. —

May the living forgive me if they sometimes appear to me as shades, so pale and ill-humoured, so restless and, alas! so lusting for life; whereas those others then seem to me so alive, as though now, after death, they could never again grow weary of life. Eternal liveliness, however, is what counts: what do "eternal life", or life at all, matter to us!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Assorted Opinions and Maxims, #408  (1879)
in Human, All Too Human
translated by R. J. Hollingdale

  
Philosophy at Troynovant
nature of existence; history of ideas

  
Remembrance at Troynovant
memory & remembering