“You can’t keep ducking forever.”

“I can till I die.”

—JOSEPH HELLER, Something Happened

I am not yet able … to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, not yet knowing this, to investigate alien matters.

—SOCRATES, PLATO, Phaedrus

It is impossible to predict or control how you will be remembered after your death. In that way, dying is like having children: you never know what will come out. In Beckett’s Endgame, he asks his parents, in effect, “Why did you have me?” and the father replies, “We didn’t know it would be you.”

—JOSEPH HELLER, 1975