For Life and Death

It is far easier to say 'for ever and ever', standing as you think you do now on the brink of eternity, than to say 'till death do us part', looking down a long and weary road of toil and sickness and poverty and change and little vexations. You do not only take this woman, young and blooming, but old and sick and withered and wearied, perhaps. Do you take her for any lot?

—Edward Eggleston, The End of the World: A Love Story.

Immortal Authors

It is a good thing that the invisible world is so thoroughly shut out from this. Clairvoyance and spirit-tapping would be great evils to the world, if it were not that the spirits even of the ablest men, in losing their bodies seem also to lose their wits. It is well that it is so, for if Washington Irving dictated to a medium accounts of the other world in such a style as that of his "Little Britain", for instance, we should lose all interest in the affairs of this sphere, and nobody would buy our novels.

—Edward Eggleston, The End of the World: A Love Story.