Death According To Sparks.

“Granny Green has gone,” said Miss Taylor.
“Ah yes, I noticed a stranger occupying her bed. Now what was Granny Green?”
“Arterio-sclerosis. It affected her heart in the end.”
“Yes, well, it is said we are all as old as our arteries. Did she make a good death?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were asleep at the time,” he said.
“No, I was awake. There was a certain amount of fuss.”
“She didn’t have a peaceful end?”
“No, not peaceful for us.”
“I always like to know,” he said, “whether a death is a good or bad one. Do keep a look out.”
For a moment she utterly hated him. “A good death,” she said, “doesn’t reside in the dignity of bearing but in the disposition of the soul.”
Suddenly he hated her. “Prove it,” he said.
“Disprove it,” she said wearily.
– Muriel Spark, Memento Mori

Living According to Dostoevsky

“Do you know I’ve been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn’t believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment—still I should want to live and, having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty, though, I shall be sure to leave the cup, even if I’ve not emptied it, and turn away—where I don’t know. But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over everything—every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t… The centripedal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Revenge According To Atwood

Now we are entering the shadowiest location in our tour of the shadow side of debt. Yes: we are approaching the Land of Revenge, the place where money can’t buy you out of a debt of honor. At this point I’d like to go back to the primate sense of fairness with which I began this book. You’ll recall that the monkeys in the experiment I described were quite happy to trade pebbles for slices of cucumber until one monkey was given a more cherished grape instead, whereupon most of the monkeys stopped trading. There’s also an experiment in which two monkeys were able to obtain a coveted food item by pulling together on a rope–neither one being able to accomplish this task solo. But the food was then available to only one of them. If this one refused to share, the second monkey would in future retaliate by refusing to pull on the rope. He preferred to punish the selfish monkey rather than take a chance at getting some food himself…
I’ll pause here to consider the word “revenge,” which according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is derived from the Latin revindicare. And revindicare is derived from vindicare, which means to justify or rescue or liberate or emancipate, as in liberating a slave. Thus, to revenge yourself upon someone is to reliberate yourself, because before doing the revenge, you aren’t free. What holds you in thrall? Your obsession with your own hatred of the other: your own vengefulness. You feel that you can’t shake free of it except through the act of revenge. The score that needs to be settled is a psychic score, and the kind of debt that can’t be paid with money is a psychic debt. It’s a wound to the soul.
– Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Life According to Steinbeck

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught–in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity, too–in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well–or ill? …
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
- John Steinbeck, East of Eden