Remarks on Death, Exile, and Humanity

"I had to laugh at the arrogance of anyone who had ever thought that human beings have conquered the earth."

  - Nando Parrado

"I stopped running from death."

  - Nando Parrado

"The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."

  - Confucius

"Silence is a true friend who never betrays."

  - Confucius; link this to the provisions in the Fifth Precept

"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated."

  - Confucius

"Life is more simple than what we think. We really make it more complex."

  - Roberto Canessa

"We receive from life a lot more than what we need and we do a lot less than what we can with it. If you have decent food to eat, a bed, water..."

  - Roberto Canessa

"But the great fact was the land itself... It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness."

  - O'Pioneers

"This is what takes us down. This is our extinction event."

  - Jenner, CVC episode

"The sky doesn't care what you hope."

  - The Indian in Untamed

"Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible be daily before your eyes, but chiefly death, and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything."

  - Epictetus, Enchiridion 21

"When the Greeks sacked a city in internal warfare, everyone would be enslaved. But they did not remember, when their bards sang of their victories, that they had denied human rights of other Greek city-states."

  - Jonathan Bowden, Credo

"But the myth of a lost paradise haunts our dreams."

  - Father Aidan Kimel

"You want to put some kind of explanation down here before you leave? Here's one as good as any you can find:

We've been banished by the creator."

  - John in the original Day of the Dead

"We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of exile."

  - J.R.R. Tolkien