Recently in Post-Mortem Pre-Nup Category

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life?daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

-Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Remember: It's not a lie, if you believe it.

- George Costanza

Funnel-web spiders are medium-to-large robust spiders that tend to be dark or black in colour. These spiders measure up to 5 cm. They have stout legs and prominent fang-bearing chelicerae that deliver a neurotoxic venom. The common name derives from the funnel-like entrance to silk-lined subterranean burrows built by both males and females. The Sydney funnel-web spider (A robustus) is responsible for most reported envenomations and the only confirmed deaths in humans. However, bites from other funnel-web spiders, particularly the northern tree spider, Hadronyche formidabilis, are likely to cause serious envenomation syndromes and are potentially deadly if untreated.

- Excerpt from Funnel-web spider bite: a systematic review of recorded clinical cases, Medical Journal of Australia

Married in White, you have chosen right. Married in Grey, you will go far away, Married in Black, you will wish yourself back, Married in Red, you will wish yourself dead, Married in Green, ashamed to be seen, Married in Blue, you will always be true, Married in Pearl, you will live in a whirl, Married in Yellow, ashamed of your fellow, Married in Brown, you will live in the town, Married in Pink, your spirit will sink.

- Old English rhyme

Fear is an emotion that makes us blind. How many things are we afraid of? We're afraid to turn off the lights when our hands are wet. We're afraid to stick a knife into the toaster to get the stuck English muffin without unplugging it first. We're afraid of what the doctor may tell us when the physical exam is over; when the airplane suddenly takes a great unearthly lurch in midair. We're afraid that the oil may run out, that the good air will run out, the good water, the good life. When the daughter promised to be in by eleven and it's now quarter past twelve and sleet is spatting against the window like dry sand, we sit and pretend to watch Johnny Carson and look occasionally at the mute telephone and we feel the emotion that makes us blind, the emotion that makes a stealthy ruin of the thinking process.

- Stephen King, Night Shift

Most people reach a point in their lives, some at eighteen and some at 88, when they ask, 'Work, buy consume, die: is that all there is?' Each time someone asks such a question the market shudders, because if there is more to life than earning and consuming the odds are that when people realise it they will devote less time to paid work and consume less.

-Clive Hamilton, Affluenza

I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.

- Joseph Conrad, Chance

What's the worst part of the job?

"Skydiving suicides."

Skydiving suicides?

"Yeah these nutters come on board the plane wanting to top themselves. Bloody ridiculous. They just jump out of the plane and never pull the bloody rip cord. Some of them get out of their harnesses before they hit the ground. Other ones wait till the chute is pulled, then cut the cords one by one and fall from there. Worse than that are the ones that change their mind at the last minute. One joker I was jumping with refused to pull, looked like he was going to go el splatto, but then he pulls it at the last second. Must have smacked the ocean at a fair clip. Maybe he drowned. I never saw him again, anyway, but he didn?t ask for his money back I can tell you that much! Fuckin' bastards."

- Interview with Hildy McVeigh, Australian Skydiver Magazine, August edition

Bodies have a natural tendency to float. When they are alive. After the lungs fill with water, the body loses its buoyancy and sinks to the ocean floor. It lies there for a while, perhaps twenty-four hours. Perhaps forty-eight. But while the body dies, things inside it live on. Little microbes, bacterium. Symbiotic organisms. They're in you, right now. They keep you alive, you keep them alive. They don't notice at first that their home has died around them, is now their watery tomb, and they keep on carrying out their little tasks, digesting, processing, respiring. Living. They continue to produce gas, swelling the belly. Eventually, the body's buoyancy is restored by all these unreleased gases, and it floats back to the surface of the water. A body's head, arms, legs, only really go one way, forward. So a body will always float face-down, after rising. By this stage the skin has absorbed a massive amount of salt water, has swelled and wrinkled, like yours toes do when you've stayed too long in the bath. It's been bleached by the sodium, all colour removed, stained white. It some cases it sloughs off completely under the weight. Little fish have nibbled on the extremities during the body's long sleep under the sea. It's likely that the toes, fingers, lips, ears, eyes, have been either severely damaged, or completely stripped to the bone.

If you are always unhappy, you're doing it wrong. If people don't like you, but you wished they liked you, so your solution is to pretend you don't wish they liked you, or that you don't like them, you're doing it wrong. If you hate everything; if you can't even stop complaining about the things you LIKE, you're doing it wrong. If you don't know you're right until you hear it from someone else, but you think you're going to change the world, one of those two things has got to give.

-Dan Harmon