Graham Caywood

“in as few words as possible, how to try to pull off the nearly impossible task of living a good life on earth. Here’s what they wrote: Know thyself. and Nothing in excess.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“if people lived forever - if they never got any older - if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy - do you think they'd bother to think hard about things the way we're doing now? i mean, we thing about just about everything, more or less - philosophy, psychology, logic. religion. literature. i kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world...

...people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now because they know they're going to die sometime. right? who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living forever? why would they have to bother? or even if they should bother, they'd probably just figure, 'oh, well, i've got plenty of time for that. i'll think about it later.' but we can't wait till later. we've got to think about it right this second...nobody knows whats going to happen. so we need death to make us evolve...death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares you or angers you.”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline