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I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.Iain M. Banks
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[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.Iain M. Banks
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The point is: what happens in heaven?'' Unknowable wonderfulness?' 'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.'' If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don't have life after death; you just have death. .Iain M. Banks
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He tried to decide if he was really ashamed of being afraid, and decided that he was not. Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance and so remade itself in whatever image it coveted. The more sophisticated you became, the less you relied on fear and pain to keep you alive; you could afford to ignore them because you had other means of coping with the consequences if things went badly. .Iain M. Banks