I use a mobile app called 'WeCroak', that sends the user a reminder notification five times a day that they are going to die. Really—the text pops up on the screen and says "Reminder, you are going to die. Open for a quote." The user then clicks the notification, and the app provides a quote about life, death, or something in between. I offer this only because it has supplied me with many beautiful, poetic, and inspiring quotes about making the most of our short, short time here, and the reminders have actually very much helped me with some of life's big questions.

Below are some of my favourite quotes that the app has supplied me in the month of October. I write them down when they are particularly striking.

"I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish." -Doris Lessing

"I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime." -Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"Every day I wake up not-dead is a gift." -Eric Sun

"Your own positive future begins in this moment. All you have is right now. Every goal is possible from here." -Lao Tzu

"To get out of your anger, you can close your eyes and visualize the other person in 300 years. What will they become? Ash. And you too." -Thich Nhat Hanh

"Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style." -Rebecca Solnit

"When people know they are going to die, that last year is often the most loving, the most conscious, and most caring—even under conditions of poor concentration, the side effects of medication, and so on. So don't wait to die until you die. Start practicing now." -Stephen Levine

"You think that they dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead." -Donald Hall

"There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon." -Matsuo Basho

"We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't." -Charles Bukowski