"I don't know if you two are fooling around with me," she said ,"but, as i said, I'm getting close to death. I suppose i could last another five or ten years. Maybe even twenty. But at my age, you certainly realise you are going to die."

"I know that I'm going to die, too," Chris said.

"No, not like an old person does. For you it's a remote idea. It might happen some day. For us, it's something that could happen tomorrow. That's why many elderly people spend the time remaining to them looking only in one direction: the past. It's not that they're so fond of their memories, but they know that looking in that direction they won't see anything to be feared.

" Very few old people look to the future, and I'm one of them. When we look into the future, we see what it holds for us: death."

-- Excerpt from " The Valkyries " by Paulo Coelho