Death calls ye to the crowd of common men.

When I first came into parliament, there was, on average, a by-election every three months - due not to MPs bailing out, but because of the death rate.

If you have ever felt slightly nauseous walking through an aged care facility, puckered your face against a smell, observed a grown woman clutching a dolly with desperation, felt a flood of melancholy...

The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.

The dead to the grave, the living to the loaf.

Half a year - maybe. Something like that. Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people look at what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often an easier person to talk to than...

Being dead's a drug', he says, 'you'll get hooked on it.

risk winding up pushing up grass in the Tinnicum Swamps out by the airport, if something went wrong.

At some time during the process, {of writing} I came up with a therapeutic device. After each draft I would tear up the pages and feed the paper to a worm compost I keep in my garage. A few months...

Do not speak to me of martyrdom, of men who die to be remembered on some parish day. I don't believe in dying though, I too shall die. And violets like castanets will echo me.

Perhaps the whole life is merely a long preparation for the moment when we part with it.

That's the good part about dying; when you've got nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal...

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But...

Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are...

The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused.