“As an atheist, I believe that all life is unspeakably precious, because it’s only here for a brief moment, a flare against the dark, and then it’s gone forever.”

“I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment… only to vanish forever.”

“Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.”

“Life is only precious because it ends, kid.”

“What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”

“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.”

“[The atheist's] faith is much greater than mine. I could never for a moment believe that all these things happened by chance. Never in a million years. But the believing atheist does, and he amazingly looks down intellectually on those that maintain that all this incredible creation wasn't an act of an incredible creator.”

“If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.”

“I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.”

“Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”