Grazing the Open Pages: All That We Have

Towards the end of Nick Tosches' biography of Arnold Rothstein, King of the Jews, there is a brief rumination on death and writing, which concludes thusly:

"But something else also occurred to me. It occurred to me that everything I knew and loved seemed to be drifting away: a whole way of living, loving and being. It occurred to me that anyone who wastes one single breath is a fool. Life is all the we have, and we must live it, for real: like leopards, like beautiful creatures, like stars that pass through the nighttime sky over the wildest, darkest, deepest sea."