He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
Irvin D. YalomRead
Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
More from Irvin D. Yalom
All quotes βA curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
Irvin D. YalomRead
A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
Irvin D. YalomRead
Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
Irvin D. YalomRead
It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!
Irvin D. YalomRead
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
Irvin D. YalomRead