Damned

Life is short. Death is forever.

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Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part.

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The first tune we meet another person an insidious little voice in our head says, "I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew." Meaning: I may be me - but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU.

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But, to be honest, when you're dead probably not even homeless people and retarded people will want to trade you places. I mean, worms get to eat you.

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If you ask me, people in Hell just scream to hear their own voice and to pass the time.

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What makes the earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it ought to feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Hell is Hell. Now, stop with the whining and caterwauling.

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I guess the worst thing they taught me was to hope.

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one's man god is another man's devil.

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By dying, do they feel as if they've disappointed everyone who ever bothered to love them? After all the effort that so many people made to raise them, to feed and teach them, do Archer of Leonard or Babette feel a crushing sense of having failed their loved ones? Do they worry that dying constitutes the biggest sin they could possibly commit? Have they considered the possibility that, by dying, each of us has generated pain and sorrow which our survivors must suffer for the remainder of their lives?

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For most of human history, Leonard says, people have perceived of Hell as a sort of inpatient clinic where we go to kick our addiction to life.

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Old habits die hard.

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My family assumed I was aboard a yacht, among giggling friends. My mom and dad assumed I had friends.

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Question after question, I'm stumped. Even fingers crossed. The paradox: Is God a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic ass? Or is God testing to see if I am?

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If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.

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To them, if Goran doesn't love them, that clearly indicates that Goran is damaged and incapable of loving anyone.

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I guess people can get used to pretty much anything.

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the dead miss everything.

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No one is discriminated against more than alive people discriminate against the dead. Nobody is as badly marginalized. If the dead are portrayed in popular culture it's as zombies ... vampires ... ghosts, always something threatening to the living. The dead are depicted the way blacks were in 1960s mass culture, as a constant danger and menace. Any dead characters must be banished, exorcised, driven from the property like Jews in the fourteenth century. Deported like illegal-alien Mexicans. Like lepers.

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the Nazi superman.

- about Hitler.

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If you asked my father for advice he'd tell you, "The secret to being a successful comedian is to never stop talking until you hear someone laugh." Meaning: Persevere. Meaning: Be determined. Make just one person laugh; then leverage that person and that joke into more laughter. As some people decide you're funny, increasing numbers of people will begin to agree.

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Mark my words: Being dead isn't all sitting around in remorseful reflection and bitter self-recrimination. Death, like life, is what you make of it.

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I hope. I hope, therefore I am. Thank God for hope.