“They darted down and rose up like a wave
Or buzzed impetuously as before;
One would have thought the corpse was held a slave
To living by the life it bore!”

“I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea,
Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that recedes.”

“This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it—and perhaps not even corpses, but the shadows of those corpses. For the dead trees and the fence posts and the bridges and the buildings on the hill all would classify as shadows. There was no life here; the life was up ahead. Life must occupy but a single point in time, and as time moved forward, life moved with it. And so was gone, thought Blaine, any dream that Man might have ever held of visiting the past and living in the action and the thought and the viewpoint of men who’d long been dust. For the living past did not exist, nor did the human past except in the records of the past. The present was the only valid point for life—life kept moving on, keeping pace with the present, and once it had passed, all traces of it or its existences were carefully erased.”

“Reeling up, blood streaming down his face from under his dented helmet, Conan glared dizzily at the profusion of destruction which spread before him. From crest to crest the dead lay strewn, a red carpet that choked the valley. It was like a red sea, with each wave a straggling line of corpses.”

“There are two kinds of people,’ she’d said. ‘Those who coast through life like ducks in a row, following one after the other, and those who ride the waves.’” Tears spilled down my cheeks, and my voice cracked. “‘Ride the waves, baby, and live. Live.”

“My problems are like waves - just as one disappears with a snarl and a hiss there’s another shaping up to knock me down.”

“unbroken happiness is a bore: it should have ups and downs.”

“And corpses, piled up like sand, shall witness,
Mute, even to the century to come,
Before the eyes of men, that never, being
Mortal, ought we cast our thoughts too high.”

“One of life’s joys was to have friends who gave you reality checks…who would call you on your crap before it rose so high you drowned in it.”

“I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.”