Quotes about the dead
page 25

“For our dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

"On the American Dead in Spain", New Masses (February 14, 1939)

“Trains, planes, cars, rockets, telescopes, tires, telephones, radios, television, electricity, atomic energy, computers, and fax machines. All miracles made possible by the minds and spirits of men with names like Ampere, Bell, Caselli, Edison, Ohm, Faraday, Einstein, Cohen, Teller, Shockley, Hertz, Marconi, Morse, Popov, Ford, Volta, Michelin, Dunlop, Watt, Diesel, Galileo, and other "dead white males." … The great majority of advancements past and present have been brought about by the genius and inventiveness of that most "despicable" of colors and genders, the dreaded white male, or, to be exact, by specific, individual white males. This is not to discredit the many contributions coming from nonwhites, but fact is fact. Our most important and consequential inventions have come almost exclusively from white males. … If you eliminate, suppress, or debase the while male, you kill the goose that laid the golden egg. If you ace him out with "affirmative" action, exile him from the family, teach him that he's a blight on mankind, then bon voyage to our society. We will devolve into a Third World cesspool. Where has there ever before in history been a group of human beings who have brought about the likes of the Magna Carta, the U. S. Constitution, and the countless life-saving and life-improving inventions that we now enjoy? … Does this mean we should sit back and let ourselves be governed by someone just because he's a white male? Of course, it doesn't. It means simply that we shouldn't suppress anyone, including white males. Let our God-given gifts run free in a free and just society, free from the oppression and tyranny of social engineers. If anyone has gifts beyond our own—be he a white male or other—be grateful. Maybe we have gifts that in some small way can contribute something of value as well. One way or another, we're all in the same boat. Few of us have truly outstanding gifts. And most of us have to humbly accept that there are others around who are more gifted than we are. In a Democratic society, it's not for Big Brother to decide who shall thrive and who shall struggle in the hive.”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

Source: The Savage Nation: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language and Culture (2003), pp. 136–138; "White Male Inventions" http://www.dadi.org/ms_dwm.htm (December 15, 1999)

Life, Men, God, World

“I find some of my new works disturbing, just as I find nature as a whole disturbing. The landscape is often perceived as pastoral, pretty, beautiful – something to be enjoyed as a backdrop to your weekend before going back to the nitty-gritty of urban life. But anybody who works the land knows it's not like that. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn't walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.”

Andy Goldsworthy (1956) British sculptor and photographer

He's got the whole world in his hands http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3663966/Hes-got-the-whole-world-in-his-hands.html, The Telegraph (24 March 2007)

Life, Beauty, Nature

“Isn't a religion supposed to be like red and green lights, for people? I mean we're going to do what we want anyway, most of us. But at least you go and you feel bad for what you did… Now what? Now we can do anything, so why go to church at all? That's why Reform Judaism is dead; it doesn't stand for anything. There's got to be more to religion than coffee cake. Or let's say, yogurt and fruit now…”

Michael Savage book The Savage Nation

The Savage Nation
The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2015-09-09
Radio, 1:23:12
2015

People, Religion, Feeling, Coffee

“We're drinking and we're dancing
but there's nothing really happening.
The place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"Closing Time"
The Future (1992)

Drink, Dance, Night

“If they think their dead grandmother is visiting them at night, more power to them. They don't need me telling them (it's) true or not true. There are those few people who may challenge the facts and say some of the stuff may not be true. I say to them, "Chill out, relax and have an open mind."”

George Noory (1950) Talk Radio Host

Feburary 15, 2006, Wired News: Coast to Coast AM is No Wack Job http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70218-0.html?tw=wn_index_1

People, Thinking, Night

“Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men—carrion
for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.
Begin it when the two men first contending
broke with one another—the Lord Marshal
Agamémnon, Atreus' son, and Prince Akhilleus.
Among the gods, who brought this quarrel on?
The son of Zeus by Lêto. Agamémnon
angered him, so he made a burning wind
of plague rise in the army: rank and file
sickened and died for the ill their chief had done
in despising a man of prayer.”

Robert Fitzgerald (1910–1985) American poet, critic and translator

opening lines
The Iliad (1974)

Men, God, Dogs, Soul

“Our poet's singing lips are dumb:
This his last gift, to us has brought
The pain pressed vintage of his thought
His life of song, his life of pain,
And, being dead, he speaks again.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

From On Reading a Posthumous book Gillian Lindsay -Biography of Flora Thompson 1990 ISBN 9781873855539
Poetry

Life, Pain, Singing

“The sky is grey
The road is grey
The building is grey
The rain is grey
Through this stretch of dead ash
Walked two children
One in bright red
One in light green.”

Gu Cheng (1956–1993) Chinese poet

"Feeling" [Ganjue]

Children, Light

“Look, I tried the cat experiment. On the third trial, the cat was dead. On each of the subsequent 413 trials, it remained dead. Am I doing something wrong?”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[1992Mar11.195332.28642@watdragon.waterloo.edu, 1992]
1990s

Cats

“Someone once told me that archaeologists are anthropologists who don’t like live people. They dig up dead ones because dead ones can’t talk back. That’s not quite true. But I think live people are too fast for most archaeologists. We’re a slow-moving lot. We look at a change in pottery technology that took a hundred years and say that’s pretty quick. We’re used to taking our time.”

Pat Murphy book The Falling Woman

Source: The Falling Woman (1986), Chapter 6 (p. 84)

People, Thinking, Change, Time

“A sad event and worthy of Memory,
Who draws forth men from their (closed) sepulchres,
Befell that piteous maid, and pitiful
Who, after she was dead was (crowned) queen.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

O caso triste, e dino da memória,
Que do sepulcro os homens desenterra,
Aconteceu da mísera e mesquinha
Que depois de ser morta foi Rainha.

Stanza 118, lines 5–8 (tr. Ezra Pound); of Inês de Castro.
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto III

Men, Sadness, Memory, Drawing

“I think that it will be a great success, that all this painting [of Edouard Manet, shortly after his death], so fresh, so vital, will electrify the 'Palais des Beaux Arts' [in Paris], which is accustomed to dead art. It will be the revenge for so many rebuffs, but a revenge that the poor boy only in his grave.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

in a letter to her sister Edma Morisot, c. Jan 1884; as cited in: Impressionist quartet, ed. Jeffrey Meyers; publishers, Harcourt, 2005, p. 124
1881 - 1895

Death, Art, Boy, Revenge

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Art

“Universal was like a family. When I was having a terrible time during my pregnancy, they came to my home and built sets right in my bedroom so I could finish the few scenes I had left in ‘That’s the Spirit’. But Columbia—that was work! I did a lot of crime pictures and another horror called ‘The Creeper’. When it was time for those cats to be all over my dead body, I yelled for a stand in. I couldn’t stand having dozens of cats walking all over me. It gave me the shivers!”

June Vincent (1920–2008) actress

An Interview with June Vincent (1996)

Family, Home, Cats, Universe

“Dark and sad will be the hour to this nation when it forgets to pay grateful homage to its greatest benefactors. The offering we bring to-day is due alike to the patriot soldiers dead and their noble comrades who still live; for, whether living or dead, whether in time or eternity, the loyal soldiers who imperiled all for country and freedom are one and inseparable.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, The Unknown Loyal Dead (1871)

Sadness, Freedom, Time, Country

“I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For I reside just as much with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough. The end has met the beginning.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

German original version: Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fassbar. Denn ich wohne grad so gut bei den Toten, wie bei den Ungeborenen. Etwas näher dem Herzen der Schöpfung als üblich. Und noch lange nicht nahe genug.
Quote from Exhibition catalogue, Galerie Goltz, Munich, published in the gallery's house journal Der Ararat (May 1920). These words were later used as Klee's epitaph in 1940.
Variant translation: I cannot be understood at all on this earth. For I live as much with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough.
As quoted in Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (1991) by Marcel Franciscono, p. 5
1916 - 1920

Heart

“And I say again, you need not worry any more about money. If I were to drop dead this instant, I have enough to double your present income if you never touched a cent of the principle. If you take a notion to do something that costs more than your income warrants, you need only let me know. You can have it.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Letter from Albania to Laura Ingalls Wilder, (October 27, 1926).

Money

“"Why not just kill all the bad people? Isn't that kind of cruel to destroy the whole world? After all, the penguins didn't sin." Well, we know that God destroyed the whole world. I think there are some things to consider about this flood. Number one, the Flood left evidence where a miracle would not. If God had just said, "Okay, I want everybody to die, except for Noah and his family", then what evidence would be left behind from that? The effects are here today for us to see and remember the judgment of God on sin. Plus, by God telling Noah to build the boat, that gave everybody warning time. Here is Noah out there for many years, some people say seven years, some people say a hundred and twenty years. The Bible doesn't say, but Noah is building this ark for a long time. People are watching him put this big boat together and said, "Noah, are you crazy? What are you doing?" He says, "Man, it's going to rain." Now keep in mind, I don't think you can prove this dogmatically, but it probably never rained before the Flood came. So Noah was preaching about something that had never happened. He said, "Hey guys, guess what. Rain is going to fall out of the sky." Everybody is looking around saying, "Yeah right, that's never happened." They thought that he was nuts. Hey, we're doing the same thing today as Christians. We're going around saying, "Hey, one of these days and angel is going to come down with the Lord and they're going to come through the clouds and blow a trumpet and the Southern Baptists rise first, (you know the dead in Christ go first) and then the rest of us are going to take off for heaven." And everybody is looking at us and saying, "Yeah right. Nobody has ever heard a trumpet blown from a cloud and seen people take off for the clouds. That's just never happened." We are preaching that something is going to happen that has never happened in the history of humanity. That's what Noah was doing. He was preaching something that was going to happen and what he was preaching about had never happened. So while he was preaching, this gave people a chance to repent.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

God, People, World, Family

“Truscott: Why aren't you both at the funeral? I thought you were mourners.
Fay: We decided not to go. We were afraid we might break down.
Truscott: That's a selfish attitude to take. The dead can't bury themselves, you know.”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

Loot (1965), Act I

Selfishness

“The destruction of the atom [the split of it, in modern physics] seemed to me to be the same as the destruction of the world.... science to me appeared to be dead: its most important basis was only a lunacy, a mistake perpetrated by learned men.... who blindly mistook one object for another.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Source: 1916 -1920, Autobiography', 1918, p. 16

Men, World, Learning, Appearance

“SPAN ID=Language_that_is> Language, that is to say, is the indispensable mechanism of human life -- of life such as ours that is molded, guided, enriched, and made possible by the accumulation of the past experience of members of our own species. Dogs and cats and chimpanzees do not, so far as we can tell, increase their wisdom, their information, or their control over their environment from one generation to the next. But human beings do. The cultural accomplishment of the ages, the invention of cooking, […] and the discovery of all the arts and sciences come to us as free gifts from the dead. These gifts, which none of us has done anything to earn, offer us not only the opportunity for a richer life than our forebears enjoyed but also the opportunity to add to the sum total of human achievement by our own contributions, however small they may be.

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), The Pooling of Knowledge, p. 13

Life, Wisdom, Age, Dogs

“Archie Rice: I'm dead behind these eyes. I'm dead, just like the whole inert, shoddy lot out there. It doesn't matter because I don't feel a thing, and neither do they.”

John Osborne The Entertainer

Number 8
The Entertainer (1957)

Feeling

“The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

Truth, World, Idea, Effort

“He mourns the dead who lives as they desire.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night II, Line 24.

“Mrs. Sandoval," Homer said swiftly, "your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong.”

William Saroyan book The Human Comedy

The Human Comedy (1943)

“If they be dead, as I can no longer doubt, we must submit to the will of God and trust in His divine Providence, that He who has given the blood of His only Son to maintain His Church will do nothing but what will redound to the advancement of His glory and the preservation of His Church—however impossible it may appear. And though we all were to die, and all this poor people were massacred and driven out, we still must trust that God will not abandon his own.”

William the Silent (1533–1584) stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, leader of the Dutch Revolt

On the loss of some of his brothers, in a letter to his brother John, as quoted in William the Silent (1897) by Frederic Harrison, p. 76

God, People, Appearance

“Dark underbelly to all of this. Sarajevo, where the [Olympic] Games were held in '84, is under threat. The UN and NATO have ordered the Serbs to have their big guns off the surrounding hills by midnight, February 20. All the love that is being manifested in these Games was once manifested in Sarajevo. The cameras pan across the great stadium — bombed out, an empty shell. […] Ten years ago, all that glory gleamed in the center of what is now a cemetery for the dead killed in a ferocious attack. What sense does it make?”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Bone: Dying into Life (2000), p. 94

Love, Game, Sense

“Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told. I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Children, Books, World, Way

“When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's "Mémoires," and came to the passage which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them-would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my been grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/140/mode/1up pp. 140-141

Death, Happiness, Family, Feeling

“The real choice is between obedience and expulsion. For this reason, there is a powerful tendency for people to want to believe that their thoughts and behavior at work are voluntary—the alternative, of perceiving the actual conflict, is simply too painful. Indeed, this struggle with conformity will be painful to the extent to which individuals are aware that it is real, to the extent to which they are aware of their own conflicting inner needs, thoughts and desires. A person will suffer more intensely the more he or she is strong and independent. Given the apparent hopelessness of resistance, there is a powerful and continuous incentive for individuals to become less aware of their own feelings, beliefs and needs. Indeed the only rational solution for an individual may often be to become dead inside, to become alienated from his or her feelings and desires.”

David Edwards (1962) british journalist, born 1962

Source: Burning All Illusions (1996), p. 36

Pain, People, Behavior, Feeling

“It's a picture perfect eveningAnd I'm staring down the sunFully loaded, deaf, and dumbAnd done waiting for sedation to disconnect my headOr any situation where I'm better off than dead”

Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter

Sweet Adeline.
Lyrics, XO (1998)

Waiting, Perfection

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while…I want you to quote this, the media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States… The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong. [The 2016 election was] a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there…You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party.”

Steve Bannon (1953) American media executive and former White House Chief Strategist for Donald Trump

Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’ by Michael M. Grynbaum New York Times https://nyti.ms/2jChcKC (January 26, 2017)

Quotes, Understanding, Country

“Shelley was kicked out of Oxford—I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares—because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Introduction to the story “The Field of Vision” p. 222
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

Way, Feeling, Thinking, Painting

“The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot. The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view; the past is alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, and of unfading interest.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Past and Future" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Past, Future

“In early 1981 one of the most important moments in my life occurred. I entered a vivisection lab … In one of the cages, I saw a young Alaskan malamute … The dog tried to lick my face through the bars. Maybe he thought I had come to save him. I saw the infected stitches in the belly, oozing pus and blood. I saw the filthy, encrusted tube that was draining fluid out of his stomach. And as I held him, I saw the rotted stitches start to come apart and his guts start to spill out. As gently as I could, I let him down onto the floor of the cage and placed my hand on him, trying to comfort him in those last few moments of his life. I was still holding him when at last he took his final struggling breaths and died. It seemed to take a lifetime. I was close to tears as I looked at the body, and I thought, this isn’t science — this is madness. Standing there, looking at that gentle animal lying dead in a bloody cage, I made a promise to him and to myself, that I would never forget him, that I would keep on fighting vivisection until it was ended.”

Chris DeRose (1948) American actor and activist

"Chris DeRose: Vegan Easy Challenge Ambassador", interview with VeganEasy.org (2011) https://web.archive.org/web/20111012130026/http://veganeasy.org/Chris-DeRose.

Life, Dogs, Lying, Tear

“The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

" The Hand that Signed the Paper Felled a City http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=98", st. 1 (1936)

Death, Country

“If you're actually certain that you're hitting only a concentration of enemy troops… then it's pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too. So they won't be able to say, 'Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

No way, 'cause it'll go straight through that as well. They'll be dead, in other words.
Quoted in * 2002-09-23
The Left and 9/11
Adam
Shatz
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20020923&s=shatz
2000s, 2002

Way, Heart

“You know it's true that politics does make for strange bedfellows. I read a quote from Saddam Hussein two days after the [Clinton] election, we had to wait two days for him to quit gut laughing. "Aaaahahahahaha, the elephant is dead," Saddam Hussein says in his quote, "we have nothing against America, we just want to see George Bush beheaded and his head kicked down the road like a soccerball." And I thought: that's so weird, 'cause … that's what I wanted to see! Wow, me and Hussein, we're like this! Who would'a thunk it?!”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Revelations (1993)

Quotes, Waiting, Reading

“His eyes are quickened so with grief,
He can watch a grass or leaf
Every instant grow; he can
Clearly through a flint wall see,
Or watch the startled spirit flee
From the throat of a dead man.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Lost Love," lines 1-6, from Treasure Box (1919).
Poems

Grass

“The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday

Men, God, Youth, Daughters

“If you don't take risks, you're already dead.”

Jim Goad (1961) Author, publisher

Shit Magnet: One Man's Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World's Guilt (Feral House, 2002)

“We are offered silence, free speech is all but dead in Europe. We live in a post free speech era, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo have proven that to the whole world.”

Tommy Robinson (1982) English right-wing activist

'Do not let Germany be dragged back to chaos and destruction': EDL founder Tommy Robinson speaks to 40,000 strong crowd at the Pegida anti-immigrant rally in Germany http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3279659/German-far-right-activists-accuse-Angela-Merkel-treason-hold-night-time-floodlit-rally-Dresden-mark-anniversary-anti-immigrant-group.html, Daily Mail (19 October 2015) 2015

World, Silence

“However, because I have experienced the help that is from God, I continue to this day bearing witness to both small and great, saying nothing except what the Prophets as well as Moses stated was going to take place that the Christ was to suffer and that as the first to be resurrected from the dead,+ he was going to proclaim light both to this people and to the nations.”

Paul of Tarsus (5–67) Early Christian apostle and missionary

26:22-23
Acts of the Apostles

God, People, Light, Suffering

“From the number of self-murderers he had known-you had to put it that way, for the fact that someone died rounded off your knowledge of that person, if only because he or she could no longer present you with surprises-he was able to conclude that his circle of acquaintance must consist of a thousand people. If he were to invite all these voluntary dead to tea, two boxes of cream cakes from Berkhof's would scarcely suffice.”

Cees Nooteboom book Rituals

Page 20
Rituals (1980)

People, Way, Knowledge, Tea

“His head was so beautiful. I tried to hold the top of his head down, maybe I could keep it in… but I knew he was dead.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

The "Camelot" interview (29 November 1963)

Beauty

“As for bravery: dead on the fields are millions who would have feared to wear a hat in inappropriate season, so I judged that brave warriors are dirt cheap as compared with untimid civilians.”

Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) American philosopher

Source: Towards a Better Life (1966), pp. 3-4

Fear, Season

“I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 39 et seq.

Light, Silence, Heart

“"A newspaper man has got to know when to keep his mouth and his mind shut. You might end up dead."
"Isn't that the usual fate of men, Harry?"”

R. A. Lafferty book Fourth Mansions

Source: Fourth Mansions (1969), Ch. 8

Men, Fate

“What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known, st. 7 (1799).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Lovers

“We must enter into the spirit of the character [for making a portrait]: here the challenge is to place this figure in the human space, to work out what he represents in relation to other people, other human personalities; when you've worked this out, you're done. this truth has to stand out in the end result of the portrait.... when this task is complete, and the subject is placed in the realm of the dead that go on living, I hand over my work.”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

As quoted by the Marini Marini Museum: http://www.museomarinomarini.it/section.php?page=fondazione

People, Truth, Personality

“We're not talking about dead people, we're talking about the aliens; of their ghosts!”

George Noory (1950) Talk Radio Host

February 26, 2004

People

“The people of your world became so stupid and rude that my companions and I no longer enjoyed teaching them. You must surely have heard of us: we were called oracles, nymphs, spirits, fairies, household gods, lemures, larvas, lamias, sprites, water-nymphs, incubi, shades, spirits of the dead, specters and ghosts.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

Sun-being to Cyrano
The Other World (1657)

God, People, Stupidity, World

“Little by little it became evident that those who used great gifts, and even genius, to establish the truth of the after life, or to seek contact with their beloved dead, suffered from a strange blindness, and obtuseness of the spirit.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XII: The Last Terrestrials; Section 1, “The Cult of Evanescence” (p. 176)

Life, Truth, Suffering

“Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

No. 36. More Poems http://www.kalliope.org/vaerktoc.pl?vid=housman/1936 (1936)

Life, Men, Lie, Thinking

“The Dead! the Dead! and sleep they here,
The lost of other years —
The Dead! the Dead! can they be here,
Where nought of Death appears?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(7th October 1826) The Tumuli
The London Literary Gazette, 1826

Death, Sleep, Appearance

“We go down with the bells ringing in all the sunken cities.
Forgotten, we are greeted by the embassies of the dead,
While your endless flowing carries us on and on;
And neither is nor was. The moment only, eternal.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Rivers" (1980), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

“There is much to be said concerning retirement. Some men cannot survive it because they have not prepared themselves for it. For the man who has retained his curiosity, retirement in old age can be the most enjoyable period of his life; but he must be aware of the emptiness of public renown and desire the peace of obscurity; he must still have the wish to learn and understand; in his village, his garden, or his house, he must have some restricted personal occupation. The wise man, after having given all his time to his public activities, now devotes himself entirely to his personal affairs and development; and this will be easier for him if he has been able to interest himself in poetry and the beauties of nature, even during his busiest years. For myself, I cannot imagine a pleasanter old age than one spent in the not too remote country where I could reread and annotate my favorite books. "The mind," says Montaigne, "must thrive upon old age as the mistletoe upon a dead oak."”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Life, Men, Books, Age

“Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“A dead father's counsel, a wise son heedeth.”

Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846) Swedish poet, professor and bishop

Canto VIII.
Fridthjof's Saga (1820-1825)

“There is not an Indian community in the world that is better off than the Indians in South Africa. That is the type of apartheid that I stand for. That is the type of apartheid that is not dead.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

As prime minister in the House of Assembly, 23 April 1979, as cited in PW Botha in his own words, Pieter-Dirk Uys, 1987, p. 40

World, Communication

“A man is the resultant and exponent of all the forces that have been brought to bear upon him, whether before his birth or afterwards. His action at any moment depends solely upon his constitution, and on the intensity and direction of the various agencies to which he is, and has been, subjected. Some of these will counteract each other; but as he is by nature, and as he has been acted on, and is now acted on from without, so will he do, as certainly and regularly as though he were a machine.
We do not generally admit this, because we do not know the whole nature of any one, nor the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a part, and being thus unable to generalise human conduct, except very roughly, we deny that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much both of a man’s character and actions to chance, or luck, or fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance; and a little reflection will teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing that must arise, and the only thing that can by any possibility arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 25

Law, Exercises, Imagination, Birth

“Many years ago I was a boy drowning in the sea. I am always drowning in the sea… down amongst the dead men, deep down. There is a peace in the sea back down to our origins… when the last man has taken his breath the sea will still be remaining. It washes everything clean. It holds within it forever the boy suspended in its body and the streaming hair and the open eyes.”

Dennis Nilsen (1945–2018) British serial killer

As quoted by Brian Masters (2011), Killing for Company, Random House, p. 49, ISBN 1446428737

Men, Peace, Boy, Sea

“The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it's going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

As quoted in "Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing" in WIRED magazine (February 1996) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html 1990s

Age

“How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?
Two years later she smiled at me. She
Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

"True Love"

World, Smile

“Little black horse.
Where are you taking your dead rider?”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

Caballito negro. ¿Dónde llevas tu jinete muerto? " Canción de Jinete, 1860 http://www.poesia-inter.net/fglc0401.htm" from Canciones (1927)

Horse

“Eisenhower climbed down from his jeep. Two unsmiling dogfaces with Tommy guns escorted him to a lectern in front of the church's steps. The sun glinted from the microphones on the lectern… and from the pentagon of stars on each of Ike's shoulder straps. "General of the Army" was a clumsy title, but it let him deal with field marshals on equal terms. He tapped a mike. Noise boomed out of speakers to either side of the lectern. Had some bright young American tech sergeant checked to make sure the fanatics didn't try to wire explosives to the microphone circuitry? Evidently, because nothing went kaboom. "Today it is our sad duty to pay our final respects to one of the great soldiers of the 20th century. General George Smith Patton was admired by his colleagues, revered by his troops, and feared by his foes," Ike said. If there were a medal for hypocrisy, he would have won it then. But you were supposed tp only speak well of the dead. Lou groped for the Latin phrase, but couldn't come up with it. "The fear our foes felt for General Patton is shown by the cowardly way they murdered him: from behind, with a weapon intended to take out tanks. They judged, and rightly, that George Patton was worth more to the U. S. Army than a Stuart or a Sherman or a Pershing," Eisenhower said. "Damn straight, muttered the man standing next to Lou. He wore a tanker's coveralls, so his opinion of tanks carried weight. Tears glinted in his eyes, which told all that needed telling if his opinion of Patton.”

Harry Turtledove (1949) American novelist, short story author, essayist, historian

Source: The Man With the Iron Heart (2008), p. 61-62

Sadness, Fear, Way, Star

“For ordinary books are like meteors; each has its moment, that instant when it flies shrieking into the air, like a phoenix, all of its pages ablaze. For that moment, that single instant, we love them; although they are mere ashes by then. Sometimes, late at night, we wander in bitter resignation through their congealed pages, whilst they go on insisting, with their wooden clattering, like a rosary, on their dead formulæ.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Book” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/book1.htm His father, Books

Love, Books, Night

“Rama Rama Rama Rama Sita Rama you chant
Do with devotion, and get the release you want…
As those Yama hordes arrive, to bid you to come
Spirit tries to escape the throat, Hari’s name will not come
Body systems cease working and our relative are bemoaning
Name of the Ocean-daughter’s lord will it come to your asking?
When your breath is blocked by phlegm in your throat
Vasudev Krishna’s name will be of no use then to shout
When you beautiful body breaks down and falls apart
As your eyes get blurred and dead, Ranga’s name will not depart
When your body juices mix up and collect down below
As the elements disintegrate, uttering God’s name will it allow.
Having born as a wicked and done many a cruel deed
As soul departs, Puranadara Vittala’s name will not proceed.”

Purandara Dasa (1484–1564) Music composer

Here Dasa explains the agony of the last stages of death and advices taking the name of god at the time, as quoted here.[Narayan, M.K.V., Lyrical Musings on Indic Culture: A Sociology Study of Songs of Sant Purandara Dasa, http://books.google.com/books?id=-r7AxJp6NOYC&pg=PA79, 1 January 2010, Readworthy, 978-93-80009-31-5, 81-82]

God, Beauty, Soul, Daughters

“Deep in the winter plain, two armies
Dig their machinery, to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave
On either side, except the dead, and wounded.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"Two Armies"
The Still Centre (1939)

Men, Hunger, Winter

“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'. But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 3

World, Dogs, Way, Flowers

“At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Thinking

“This is kind of complex, because Jesus did identify with the victims. But Jesus was not a victim. He was a conqueror…Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life…. If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would’ve come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did. That’s an abomination.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

Glenn Beck
Television
Fox News
2010-07-13
00:06:00
Glenn Beck: Jews Killed Jesus
2010-07-13
Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/15/glenn-beck-jews-killed-je_n_648134.html
2010s, 2010

Life, Death

“For some the wind can fleshly blow,
for some the sunlight fade at ease,
but we, made partners in our dread,
hear but the grating of the keys,
and heavy-booted soldiers' tread.
As if for early mass, we rose
and each day walked the wilderness,
trudging through silent street and square,
to congregate, less live than dead.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), Dedication

““If you show her too much favor she will be punished. If you touch her, we’re all dead,” Ty said.
“Why?” Einstein asked.
“Because this is one of those cultures that is psychotic about female reproductive organs.””

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty, than live for bread.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Beauty
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Beauty

“Those whose minds are jammed with prejudice have room for little else. Growth is dead. Learning is gridlocked. They may understand our logic, but logic makes no difference. The word root of prejudice, praejudicium, implies prejudgment. People are prejudiced both for and against a philosophy, a religion, a belief system. They are prejudiced for or against a political party, the make of an automobile, a race, a person — you name it.”

Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer

Source: How to Argue and Win Every Time (1995), Ch. 6 : The Power of Prejudice : Examining the Garment, Bleaching the Stain, p. 74

People, Religion, Understanding, Learning

“More than anything else now, though, he wanted to save Darckense. He had seen too many dead, dry eyes, too much air-blackened blood, too much fly-blown flesh, to be able to relate such ghastly truths to the nebulous ideas of honor and tradition that people claimed they were fighting for. Only the well-being of one loved person seemed really worth fighting for now; it was all that seemed real, all that could save his sanity.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter I (p. 444).

Love, People, Truth, Idea

“Whoever attacks a custom or a creed, will be confronted with a list of the names of the dead who upheld the custom, or believed the creed. He is asked in a very triumphant and sneering way, if he knows more than all the great and honored of the past. Every defender of a creed has graven upon his memory the names of all "great" men whose actions or words can be tortured into evidence for his doctrine.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The Great Infidels (1881)

Men, Way, Memory, Past

“"Do not die that we may not die," the dead cry out within you. "We had no time to enjoy the women we desired; be in time, sleep with them! We had no time to turn our thoughts into deeds; turn them into deeds! We had no time to grasp and to crystallize the face of our hope; make it firm!" …
But you must choose with care whom to hurl down again into the chasms of your blood, and whom you shall permit to mount once more into the light and the earth.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

Women, Hope, Sleep, Light

“Avant-garde art has become habitual, a dead letter with little spiritual consequence, however materially refined.”

Donald Kuspit (1935) American art critic

"Reconsidering the Spiritual in Art" http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/gallery/kuspit_d/reconsidering_print.htm, Blackbird (2003).

Art

“This life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Life, World

“Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else than a mixture and dispersion. Why, then, art thou disturbed? Say to this ruling faculty, Art thou dead, art thou corrupted, art thou playing the hypocrite, art thou become a beast, dost thou herd and feed with the rest?”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

IX, 39
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IX

Art, Intelligence, Parting

“There's nothing like the waiting room of any office of the governmentor its allies to remind you of how lucky you are. You enter a nonplace, nontime. You sit on battered chairs in murky blues and greens that nobody ever names as their favorite color. You stare at the signs that have no bearing on you, nonspecific communiqués from the land that punctuation forgot. You wait until the waiting loses all sense of direction or purpose, until you become like a stone deposited in a field millenia ago by a careless glacier. You are here. This is all you have ever known. In the meantime you are stripped of any sense of individuality, of the idea that you might be different from anyone else in the room except by virtue of your particular problem; and so you become the problem, defensively, accepting it as identity, until it swells and suppurates and becomes all you are. As a species we'll tolerate being close to others, but not so close, and not in those circumstances and when we feel so small: we become rows of dry, fretting eyes, hating everyone around us and sincerely wishing our neighbor dead so we can move up one place in the line.Or maybe it was just me.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 5

Hate, Color, Feeling, Idea

“... our confidence in foretelling and influencing events increases in inverse ratio to our ability to do so. The farther we go from ourselves and from the present, the less we sense the probabilities, and it is easy for us to be "dead certain" about things we cannot possibly know anything about.**The Rules of Chaos (1969), p 23,24”

Stephen Vizinczey (1933) Hungarian-Canadian writer

Confidence, Sense

“I have made no secret of my conviction, not merely that personality persists, but that its continued existence is more entwined with the life of every day than has been generally imagined; that there is no real breach of continuity between the dead and the living; and that methods of intercommunion across what has been deemed a gulf can be set going in response to the urgent demand of affection,—that in fact as Diotima told Socrates (Symposium, 202 and 203)”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

Love bridges the chasm. Raymond, p. 83 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=107 Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

Life, Secret, Imagination, Personality

“Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of expiring victims, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there. It gives one the image of a giant's den in a romance, bestrewed with scattered heads and mangled limbs.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Spence's Anecdotes and The Guardian (21 May 1713); as quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), p. 132.

Animals

“The dead are friends whom death is powerless to take from us. Great writers are immortal companions who can embellish our old age as they enchanted our young days. Music, too, is an extraordinarily faithful friend. To those of us who have lost our faith in human nature, it offers refuge in other pleasant worlds.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Death, Age, World, Faith

“What he reveals is an issue of the utmost importance: how essential it is for the Christian to recognize a plural, numinous universe, made up of angels, saints, the dead and demons - which are not the same as God…that if this created numinous plurality ceases to be understood as a reality, the very concept of God will be disfigured and distorted.. to deny all such powers and figures is just as false, just as ominous as to succomb to them.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

another article by Karl Rahner in Geist und Leben
Broken Lights Letters 1951-59

God, Angels, Reality, Universe

“No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: "No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into."”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

As quoted in "Notable & Quotable: The Victims of Socialism" https://web.archive.org/web/20160217064704/http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-the-victims-of-socialism-1455667462 (17 February 2016), The Wall Street Journal, A13 2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

History, Problem, Suicide

“On the battlefield called Vigrid, the gods will fall in battle with the frost giants, and the frost giants will fall in battle with the gods. The undead troops from Hel will litter the ground in their final deaths, and the noble Einherjar will lie beside them on the frozen ground, all of the them dead for the last time, beneath the lifeless misty sky, never to rise again, never to wake and fight.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Source: Norse Mythology (2017), Chapter 16, “Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods” (p. 276)

Death, God, Lie, Time

“Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead!”

Jack Gibson (1929–2008) Australian rugby league player and coach

Gibson quotes the title of the song from The Wizard of Oz at the start of his post-game speech to fans after his Parramatta Eels side win the club their first-ever Australian Rugby League premiership title in 1981 after thirty four years in the competition. Gibson then promptly ended the speech and went back to his celebrating players.

“When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Age, Thinking, Time, Reading

“It was here that I first saw the light of day; here I received my bride, here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of our eternal hills.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Vermont is a State I Love (1928)

Love, Lie, Light

“If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: "Byron is dead!"”

Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866) Scottish writer

Letter to Thomas Carlyle (20 May 1824]).

Idea, Sun

“A religion, which is not able or no more able to raise to the height of acquired science, is a dead religion.”

Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) German Reform Rabbi

Eine Religion, welche nicht oder nicht mehr fähig ist, sich auf die Höhe der erworbenen Wissenschaft zu erheben, ist eine tote Religion.
Quoted in Lippische Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Landeskunde, Volume 75, p. 127

Religion, Science