the life i've lived...

"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breath back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet.
That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed..."

-Tehanu from "The Other Wind" by Ursula K. Le Guin