"Why was it he felt so perfectly attuned to winter, to its fatalistic expectation of the worst, then, when the worst came, its rustic heroisms and shouldering of burdens, improvised ingeniousness, constructive despair?" - Violet Trefusis, 'Pirates at Play'.

"In every single moment of life we are beings that will die, and each moment would be otherwise if this were not our innate condition, somehow operative within it. Just as we are not already fully present in the instant of our birth, but rather something of us is continually being born, so too we do not die only in our last instant." - Georg Simmel 1918 (tr. Andrews and Levine, 2010)