The dead pull the living down.

What your mind sees when you close your eyes marks the entrance to an endless universe: your imagination.

Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, __ou__e going to die, you know._ However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.