If I had my life to live over again
I should form the habit of nightly
composing myself to thoughts of death.
I would practice, as it were,
the remembrance of death.

Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise.
It should be part of the full expectancy of life.
Without an ever-present sense of death,
Life is insipid.
You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

We do not possess imagination enough
to sense what we are missing.

Jean Toomer