
“If you are prepared to die, you are prepared to live.”
On the death of John Evans Atta-Mills - "Prophet TB Joshua Opens Up On Atta-Mills' Death" https://www.naij.com/4448.html Naij (August 1 2012)
Interview with Alex Haley
“If you are prepared to die, you are prepared to live.”
On the death of John Evans Atta-Mills - "Prophet TB Joshua Opens Up On Atta-Mills' Death" https://www.naij.com/4448.html Naij (August 1 2012)
“To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.”
Remarks by President Obama at the 70th Anniversary of D-Day at Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, Omaha Beach, Normandy, France at June 6, 2014 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/06/remarks-president-obama-70th-anniversary-d-day-omaha-beach-normandy
2014
Not by Twain, but from Edward Abbey's A Voice Crying In The Wilderness (1989).
Misattributed
“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
Source: Gabriel García Márquez: a Life
page 229.
The God of Small Things (1997)
Variant: It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secrets of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones that you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.