Then the idiot asks me if I'm ready to die now in Sarajevo. I told them that I've thought up hundreds of ways to stay alive, and I like all of them. Each one reminds me of the joys and pleasures of my life, because nobody's happier than me when I escape a shell on my way here to dig graves in this beautiful spot for the unlucky ones. I know that the dead used to celebrate being alive too, and that they just happened to lose a life the way some people lose a pinball at the end of the game, having scored a hundred points a hundred times - you could have scored more, but... you didn't. Life is only valuable because you know you have it. Death always finds you unprepared, without tangible proof that you ever lived. Perhaps you weren't much good to yourself or to others. Isn't that why your wife and children cry at your funeral? Because they have a sense that you foolishly squandered your life, like a chicken that refuses to die even after you've chopped off its head".
Miljenko Jergović, "The Gravedigger" in Sarajevo Marlboro, pages 80 and 82
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