"Learn that mortality is the stuff of life; learn how soon the young get old, how short a while forever is. It's sad to stand on the hill and one by one, see the lights go out around you; sad to know the paper has begun to yellow before the pencil gets to the bottom of the page, to realize there won't be time enough to get it all done -- the chores, the kid raising, the sitting on the porch to watch the swallows dart at dusk, the major work. But there's something reassuring too in understanding that it -- death -- is nature's, life's, God's way of letting us know that we were never meant to save the world singlehandedly, to keep the sun aloft and the old globe spinning.

What we're meant to do, I hope, is fill some small and temporary slot, to give off a little light for a little while and then lie down. I'm comfortable with that, with the notion of being a small voice yapping away at the edge of a large prairie in the northern half of a small planet. One of many voices, neither the wisest nor the best, but mine, and fairly close as good as I can make it."

~Jerome D. Lamb "The Small Voice"