7 Quotes by Erika Hayasaki

Each stage of life is filled with unique challenges, but the ways in which each person learns to survive, according to Erikson, create character.Sometimes these lessons needed to be examined beyond textbooks, in the lives and life cycles of everyday people.

She believed cemeteries held the stories that history books could not always document; they were the overlooked, underused classrooms beneath our feet . . .

It’s good to be alive, right?” the professor often told her students . . . “Did you notice how fragile we are? We have no business taking our lives for granted.

Norma Bowe often said she believed there was a wonder in unleashing your story, horrible as it might be, out into the world. She told her students that speaking it aloud releases a different kind of power from writing it down on paper or typing it on a computer screen. Give it voice, and you never know what kind of gift might find its way back in return.

. . . fear of death makes us want to engage in activities that render us unique, allowing us to reach a level of putative immortality. Death anxiety, Becker believes, is the powerful undercurrent stirring human behavior.

The inevitable question always followed: Is there life after death?Everyone had to answer that question based on his or her own beliefs, the professor said. For some of her students, that absence of scientific evidence of an afterlife did little to change their feelings about their faith. For others, it put that much more pressure on this life.

There was no denying it: life’s edges brimmed with misery and cruelty. No wonder people often concluded that the dead were better off.