“From a scientific perspective, ‘destroy’ isn’t really accurate. Nothing has disappeared. All the matter that used to be there is still there, and so is all the angular momentum. It’s only the arrangement of matter that has changed, like a deck of cards being reshuffled. But life is like a straight flush: once you shuffle, it’s gone.” 

–Windfall, an astronomer, in Death’s End, by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

            --Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in a letter of condolence to the sister of an old friend, March 1955. Quoted in Disturbing the Universe (1979), Freeman Dyson, p. 193