I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind – and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Vintage, 2004) p. 38

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Vintage, 2004) p. 34

I'd say we all have a dead child within us. We don't die once, we have already died several times over.

Christian Boltanski & Tamar Garb, 'Interview' in Christian Boltanski (Phaedon, 1997)

Boltanski: Well, I'd say that there are very few subjects in art, and these are looking for God, asking questions about death and love and sex. I'm working around the idea of vanitas, a huge subject in art. You are somebody, but if I kill you, you will become an awful body in a bloody sheet, an object. I find that idea very strange and unclear and it's a question I often think about. I also think that our relationship with death and dying these days is not good at all. Fifty years ago one's grandfather, say, would die at home, and the grandchild would see the grandfather's dead face. The fact of dying was inside the fact of living. Now we've become ashamed of dying, we want to forget that we're going to die. Dying has become an accident. But I think it's important to speak about it as it's the only thing we can really be sure of. We are all going to die. We also have a problem with the fact of killing. For example, I eat meat but I would never dream of killing an animal. But I think if we eat meat, we have to accept that being alive means that we kill things around us. But we forget these basic aspects of our humanity.

Garb: But there's a difference between speaking about death as one of the grand themes of life, and confronting one's own death. Is making art about death yet another defence against the question of your own mortality?

Boltanski: I'm sure of it. When I told you at the beginning of the interview that I was 'dead' already, it was to do with avoiding death. If you are already dead then you don't have to die.

Christian Boltanski & Tamar Garb, 'Interview' in Christian Boltanski (Phaedon, 1997)

We can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remain. There are two: one is the rumour about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete); the other product of this diathesis is folly – which, to be sure, has utterly squandered the substance of wisdom, but preserves its attractiveness and assurance, which rumour invariably lacks.

Walter Benjamin, 'Max Brod's Book on Kafka' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 142

To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.

Franz Kafka, quoted in Walter Benjamin 'Franz Kafka' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 126

It is a desire to stand in the ritual unfolding of the world that inspires me to build, rather than only wander and see, for to build is to participate more fully in the great cycles of natural change. In building, I do not propose a return to nature, much less a return to primitivism, but an alignment of modern technology, including that of architecture, with cycles of change and the great powers both active and latent in the world.

Lebbeus Woods, Origins (Architectural Association, 1985) p. 42