Vocaboly.com

[muslim]

I want to paraphrase this passage:

All of us have read thrilling stoies in which the hero had only a limited and specified time to live. Sometimes as long as a year; sometimes as short as twenty-four hours. But always we were interested in discovering just how the doomed man chose to spend his last days or his last hours. I speak, of course, of free men who have a choice, not condemned criminals whose sphere of activities is strictly delimited.(The Atlantic Monthly)