“The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.”
"Dreaming of My Deceased Wife on the Night of the Twentieth Day of the First Month" (《江城子·乙卯正月二十日夜记梦》), in Song of the Immortals: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, trans. Yuanchong Xu (Beijing: New World Press, 1994), p. 202
“The dead are specters of the living, but the living are specters of the dead.”
Light (1919), Ch. XIV - The Ruins
Context: I am not in pain. I am extraordinarily calm; I am drunk with tranquillity. Are they dead, all — those? I do not know. The dead are specters of the living, but the living are specters of the dead. Something warm is licking my hand. The black mass which overhangs me is trembling. It is a foundered horse, whose great body is emptying itself, whose blood is flowing like poor touches of a tongue on to my hand.
“Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.”
Source: The Stand
“Like God, however, ideology is dead. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century killed it.”
Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 177
Book VII, 7.75-[3]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book VII
“Talking to yourself is a sign of madness. Talking to yourself, dead, is class.”
c. 12
Paint Your Dragon (1996)
“If the living are haunted by the dead. Then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.”
Source: Damned (2011)
