(Pretentious) Literary Quote of the Day

This is from "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles. It's pretty much the only thing from the book that stayed with me. One of the main characters has just died and his wife is remembering a conversation they had.

She had quite forgotten the August afternoon only a little more than a year ago, when they had sat alone out on the grass beneath the maples, watching the thunderstorm sweep up the river valley toward them, and death had become the topic. And Port had said: "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless." She had not listened at the time because the idea had depressed her; now if she called it to mind it would have seemed beside the point.