p. 106 I said one evening that all I really wanted in life was one full day in which there should be absolutely nothing I had to do. Johnny: "Try jumping off the Empire State Building."
p. 140 All the doctors! - helpless flies now, climbing across the granite face of Death. Johnny died at 11:02pm. Frances reached for him through the ugly, transparent, raincoat curtain of the oxygen machine. I felt his arms, cupping my hands around them, and the warmth gradually left them, receding very slowly upward from his hands. For a long time some warmth remained. Then little the life-color left his face, his lips became blue, and his hands were cold. What is life? It departs covertly.
p. 142 We said goodbye. But to anybody who ever know him, he is still alive, I do not mean merely that he lives in both of us or in the trees at Deerfield or in anything he touched truly, but that the influence, the impact, of a heroic personality continues to exert itself long after mortal bonds are snapped. Johnny transmits permanently something of what he was, since the fabric of the universe is continuous and eternal.
p. 145 Knowing [Johnny] and thinking of his stubborn refusal to accept defeat makes me believe that that spirit will live on. For such there must be an immortality which we who tinker at the body may guess at but not understand.
p. 173 Wednesday: Self analysis: About half time my conscious mind is either asleep or wandering off in space. This... accounts for procrastination etc. I am greatly overintrovert - caused by over-consciousness of what others think of me. Caused by my atheism (?).
p. 191 Today, when I see parents impatient or tired or bored with their children, I wish I could say to them, But they are alive, think of the wonder of that! They may be a care and a burden, but think, they are alive! You can touch them - what a miracle! ...Your sons and daughters are live. Think of that- not dead but alive! Exult and sing. All parents who have lost a child will fell what I mean. Others, luckily, cannot. But I hope they will embrace them with a little added rapture and a keener awareness of joy.
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