How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Nearly every night, I jerked awake, sweating. Almost always, the dream was the same:
I walk along a dark city street; tall buildings without doors or windows loom at me through a dark swirling mist.
A towering shape cloaked in black strides toward me. I feel rather than see a chilling specter, a gleaming white skull with black eye sockets that stare at me in deathly silence. A finger of white bone points at me; the white knucklebones curl into a beckoning claw. I freeze. (P.9-11)
Dan's recurring nightmare sets up the antagonist of the story: Death. Basically, the Grim Reaper is the final boss of this book. Dan's fear of dying is the ultimate enemy he must overcome.
Quote #2
Suddenly I felt a terrible, nagging fear, the worst of my life. Was it possible that I had missed something very important—something that would have made a real difference? No, impossible, I assured myself. I cited all my achievements aloud. The fear persisted. (1.140)
This passage is from one of the visions Socrates gives Dan, the one where Dan sees himself aging. At this point in the vision, he's elderly and very close to death. He tries to list his achievements, but they don't stop his fear that he's lived life mistakenly. What do you think? Do achievements bring confidence in the face of death, or are they ultimately not a defense?
Quote #3
"You want Forever, you desire Eternity. In your deluded belief that you are this "mind" or "spirit" or "soul," you find the escape clause in your contract with mortality. Perhaps as "mind" you can wing free of the body when it dies, hmm?"
"It's a thought," I said with a grin.
"That's exactly what it is, Dan—a thought—no more real than the shadow of a shadow." (3.101-103)
As it is throughout this book, the mind is at fault for Dan's hope that his unique personality can persist after death. That hope, Socrates says, is a mere thought—and thoughts are unreal, mere illusions. All this talk of mortality is pretty grim—so here, have an emergency kitten.
Quote #4
"For now, just think of death as a transformation—a bit more radical than puberty, but nothing to get particularly upset about. It's just one of the body's changes. When it happens, it happens. The warrior neither seeks death nor flees from it." (4.410)
Here Socrates emphasizes that death is just one more change. That's what Dan's final vision, near the end of the book (8.61-79), also reveals, when he sees animals feasting on his corpse, basically the great cycle of life and death. It's not something to get upset over, he concludes like Socrates, because we are really everything. We are part of Consciousness, not our unimportant individual personalities.
Quote #5
"Death is not sad; the sad thing is that most people don't really live at all." (4.411)
In other words, mortality is a fact of life, so it's not something to get sad about, any more than 2+2=4 is something to get sad about. The real question is how to live a good, fulfilling life.
Quote #6
"Consider your fleeting years, Danny! One day you'll discover that death is not what you imagine; but then, neither is life. Either may be wondrous, filled with change; or, if you do not awaken, both may turn out to be a considerable disappointment." (7.117)
Throughout this novel, Dan is, deep down, afraid of death. That's what's holding him back from a life of peace and happiness. It isn't until he passes through the gate—see the Symbols, Imagery, Allegory section for more on the gate—that Dan is able to get over his ultimate fear.
Quote #7
"Wake up! If you knew for certain that you had a terminal illness—if you had little time left to live—you would waste precious little of it! Well, I'm telling you, Dan—you do have a terminal illness: It's called birth. You don't have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason—or you never will be at all." (7.118)
Life is one big terminal illness, Socrates says, so you have to make every moment count. And to him, what counts is being happy. You might contrast this with the views of other philosophers, teachers, or religious thinkers who pick out other things to be the big dealy-o that matters… whether that's obeying religious laws, fulfilling a duty to help society, or something else.
Quote #8
Socrates had told me, long ago, that even for the warrior, there is no victory over death; there is only the realization of Who we all really are. (7.120)
This passage is from Dan's lonely, desperate search to find enlightenment in his years after the gas station. It foreshadows what he'll encounter passing through the gate—see the Symbols, Imagery, Allegory section for more on that.
Quote #9
I realized now that the Grim Reaper, the Death Dan Millman had so feared, had been his great illusion. And so his life, too, had been an illusion, a problem, nothing more than a humorous incident when Consciousness had forgotten itself. (8.67)
After his vision of his body's inevitable decomposition, Dan realizes that in the big picture, our little lives aren't worth worrying over, since we all turn to dust anyway. We can be reassured knowing we are one with everything, a grand Consciousness. Unfortunately, mortal life makes most of us forget that, but with a teacher such as Socrates the truth can be reclaimed.
Quote #10
Well, I thought, now I am playing Dan Millman again, and I might as well get used to it for a few more seconds in eternity, until this, too, passes. But now I know that I am not only the single piece of flesh—and that secret makes all the difference! (8.76)
Here Dan tells us that the super-duper secret that grants him peace is the knowledge he's not only his mortal body. He's everything, the Consciousness of it all. It has taken all of Socrates' training and all of Dan's discipline to prepare him to arrive at this awareness well enough to truly adopt it and give up his attachment to his mind and mortal life.