I'm reading a book...

...right now called Almost a Family, by John Darnton, who used to write for the New York Times. (The memoir of an ordinary person is my favorite genre.)

Barney Darnton, the author's father, was killed in World War II shortly after John was born. Darnton's widowed mother raised him and his older brother, Bob, by herself. The book is essentially about the author's search for the father he never knew.

I'm almost finished, but I was struck by a sentence I just read:

We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts.