Life Is Beautiful, Even in the Wake of an Accident
Hannah Arendt:
…when I awoke in the car and became conscious of what had happened[,] I tried out my limbs, saw that I was not paralyzed and could see with both my eyes, then tried out my memory — very carefully, decade by decade, poetry, Greek and German and English, then telephone numbers. Everything all right. The point was that for a fleeting moment I had the feeling that it was up to me to decide whether I wanted to live or to die. And though I did not think that death was terrible, I also thought that life was quite beautiful and that I rather like it.
A letter to Mary McCarthy in April 1962, after a car accident in Central Park (Between Friends, pp. 126f)