Quotes about the dead
page 6

“Then why haven’t you killed yourself? (Astrid)
Why should I? The only enjoyment I have in my life is knowing I piss off everyone around me. If I were dead, it would make them all happy. God forbid I should ever do that. (Zarek)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

Life, God, Happiness

“The upshot of her tirade was that I was the devil's spawn and should be locked up in a tower before I unleashed hordes of the living dead to slaughter them all in their sleep. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but not by much.”

Kelley Armstrong The Reckoning

Source: The Reckoning

Sleep

“Me? I slept like the dead, which I hoped wasn’t a sign of things to come.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Hope

“The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise (1984)

Dreams, Thinking, Time

“The only way I'm keeping my hands off her is if I'm dead. Find another way to fix us.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: Reflected in You

Way

“How do our lives ravel out
into the no-wind, no-sound,
the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:
echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string:
in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,
dead gestures of dolls.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

Source: As I Lay Dying

“Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

Question, Parent

“You gotta take chances in this life or you're already
dead.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Second Helpings

Life, Chance

“In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Sleep, Depressing

“Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Animals

“He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled.

Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of.”

Richard S. Prather (1921–2007) American writer

Source: Take a Murder, Darling

People, Suicide

“I wish she was dead,' he says. 'I wish they were all dead and we were, too. It would be best.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

“She already felt dead in everything but name. What remained to be taken from her? She longed to be enfolded, welcomed, into the earth - to breathe no more, love no more, hurt no more”

Alan Brennert (1954) American writer

Source: Moloka'i

Love, Hurt

“Enemies will kill you with a knife in the back. Friends will kill you with kindness. Either way you're dead.”

Richard Kadrey (1957) San Francisco-based novelist, freelance writer, and photographer

Source: Kill the Dead

Way

“I feel dead, wasted, awful, broken and useless. It's not the kind of feeling you forget.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Feeling, Forgetting

“It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Cordelia's Honor (1996), "Author's Afterword"

Feeling

“I'd rather die while I'm living than live while I'm dead.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

Life, Hurt

“i'm sure i'm worth a lot more dead than alive”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

“Dead Max was the biggest oxymoron in history.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Nevermore

History

“If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.”

Stephen King book Under the Dome

Source: Under the Dome

“You stand on dead men's legs. You've never had any of your own. You couldn't walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Source: The Sea Wolf

Men

“And when I saw him[my father] lying dead in a pool of his own blood, I knew then that I hadn't stopped believing in God. I'd just stopped believing God cared. There might be a God, Clary, and there might be not. Either way, we're on our own.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Variant: I knew then that I hadn't stopped believing in God. I'd just stopped believing God cared. There might be a God, Clary, and there might not, but I don't think it matters. Either way we're on our own.
Source: City of Bones

God, Way, Lying

“But this…this kid wasn’t dead yet. Makes no sense to me. (Bubba)
Maybe someone spiked his Wheaties? (Nick)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infinity

Sense

“How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Idea

“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”

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

Source: Self-Reliance

Thinking

“They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories

Night

“You don't accomplish much by swimming with the mainstream. Hell, a dead fish can do that.”

Kinky Friedman (1944) Singer, songwriter, novelist, humorist, politician

Hell, Fish

“Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

Age, Past, Romantic

“I decided to stay in bed until noon. Maybe by then half the world would be dead and it would only be half as hard to take.”

Charles Bukowski book Pulp

Source: Pulp

World

“No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“This is a 911? You know you only text that when someone is dead or dying. You scared the crap out of me.”

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

“I want to be untouchable and beautiful and completely dead inside.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Source: Baby Be-Bop

Beauty

“Fang felt a cold jolt, then dismissed it. Max wasn’t dead. He would know, somehow. He would have felt it. The world still felt the same to him; therefore, Max was still in it.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

World

“No one who writes a good book is really dead.”

Walter Moers (1957) German comic creator and author

Books

“The dead always outnumber the living. These spirits have waited centuries, unable to express their anger. Now I have given them bodies of earth.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Waiting, Anger

“Do you feel disappointed because something you planned didn’t work out If so you can get re-appointed today. In God there are never any dead-ends only detours. Don’t ever give up. Just keep trying until you succeed.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

God, Disappointment, Feeling

“Rule No.37 The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

Michael Pollan (1955) American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism

“What kind of man refers to himself as safely dead?”

Megan Whalen Turner (1965) American children's writer

“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

Time, Forgetting

“Anubis frowned. He locked his very nice eyes with mine.
“You’re not dead.”
“No,” I said. “Though we’re trying awfully hard.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“Why aren't you dead?" Will demanded.”

Cinda Williams Chima (1952) Novelist

Source: The Warrior Heir

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

John Milton book Areopagitica

Source: Areopagitica

Life, Books, Soul

“The dead don't desire revenge, but the happiness of the livng. To dirty your small hands would bring joy to no one.
-Kenshin to Eiji”

Nobuhiro Watsuki (1970) Japanese manga artist

Happiness, Revenge, Joy

“And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

Source: The Second Sex

“We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King

Dreams

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Source: Self-Consciousness

Death, Time, Personality

“At first she was overjoyed that he would be with her, but then she recalled that human people could not live under the water, and he could only visit her father's palace as a dead man.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Little Mermaid

Source: The Little Mermaid

People, Water

“Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

Way, Soul, Optimism, Nature

“Also consider that someday, when you’re dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Rant

Source: Rant

Stupidity, Time, Baby

“Do you think…"
He raised his eyebrows. "Do I think what?"
"That Valentine might have drowned?"
"Never believe the bad guy is dead until you see a body," said Simon. "That just leads to unhappiness and surprise ambushes.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Guy, Thinking

“In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion

Food

“This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby

“Five Great Charters knit the land
together linked hand and hand.
One in the people who wear the crown
Two in the folk who keep the Dead down
Three and Five became stone and mortar
Four sees all in frozen water.”

Garth Nix book Abhorsen

Source: Old Kingdom series (The Abhorsen Trilogy), Sabriel (1995), p. 216.

People, Water

“Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

Madness

“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

“To my son,

If you are reading this letter, then I am dead.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Reading

“As the water pounded on my back, I reflected that I must be pretty simple. It didn't take much to make me happy. A long night with a dead guy had done the trick.”

Charlaine Harris book Dead to the World

Source: Dead to the World

Happiness, Guy, Water, Night

“F**k them is what I say. I hate those ebooks. They can not be the future. They may well be. I will be dead. I won't give a s**t.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

Hate, Future

“So you drive as far as you can, even when you can clearly read the sign. You want to think you are exempt, that it doesn’t apply to you. But it does. Life is still a dead end. And we still have a hard time believing it”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Life, Thinking, Time, Reading

“All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.”

Wally Lamb book She's Come Undone

Source: She's Come Undone

Truth, World

“Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Thinking, Heart

“That was when the ones who smiled
Were the dead, glad to be at rest.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Smile

“Sutton's dead. Tell no one. Keep playing along… or you're next.”

Sara Shepard The Lying Game

Source: The Lying Game

“While we are alive we should sit among colored lights and taste good wines, and discuss our adventures in far places; when we are dead, the opportunity is past.”

Jack Vance (1916–2013) American mystery and speculative fiction writer

Color, Light, Wine, Past

“I'm not dead yet, just in a state of rapid decay, who isn't?”

Charles Bukowski book Pulp

Source: Pulp

“Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.”

Eva Ibbotson A Company of Swans

Source: A Company of Swans

Books, Loneliness

“I’ve got your back. Nothing alive will ever hurt you if I have breath in me. And nothing dead will hurt you if I don’t.” (Kisten)”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: For a Few Demons More

Hurt

“Whipped cream isn't whipped cream at all if it hasnt been whipped with whips, just like poached eggs isn't poached eggs unless it's been stolen in the dead of the night.”

Roald Dahl book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Source: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Night

“The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

Star

“Life would be a great deal easier if dead things had the decency to remain dead.”

Doug MacLeod (1959) Australian writer

Life

“One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emerge fresh and new and in a completely different form.”

Anne Fadiman (1953) American essayist, journalist and magazine editor

Children, Thinking, Learning, Joy

“Lips to lips, mouth to mouth,
Comes the speaker of the shrouds,
Suck in the spirit, speak the words,
Let secrets of the dead be heard.”

Yasmine Galenorn (1961) American writer

Source: Witchling

Secret

“Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book The Guns of August

Source: The Guns of August

“If you can't take care of me while I'm alive, you have made me dead anyway.”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

“I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Time, Past

“Being a stranger was like being dead,
and brought to mind how, in a book he had read
that most folks misunderstood one common state:
The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.”

David Rakoff (1964–2012) writer

Source: Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish

Love, Hate, Books, Reading

“She sees ghosts,” said Samuel, impatient with my whining.

"I see dead people,” I deadpanned back. Oddly, it was Uncle Mike who laughed. I hadn’t thought he’d be a moviegoer.”

Patricia Briggs book Iron Kissed

Source: Iron Kissed

People

“I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Source: Jude the Obscure

Success

“It's good to keep changing your mind. It shows you're thinking. I'll only stop changing my mind when I'm dead. And maybe not even then.”

John Marsden (1950) author

Source: Darkness, Be My Friend

Thinking, Change

“I didn't know what to think about first: me seeing Claude naked, Claude seeing me naked, or the whole fact that we were related and naked in the same room.
(Sookie Stackhouse, Dead in the Family)”

Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family

Source: Dead in the Family

Family, Thinking

“I am dead. Only vengeance can restore me! Only victory can return my life to me!”

Terry Goodkind book Stone of Tears

Source: Stone of Tears

Life, Victory

“If you are not dancing, your dead.”

Lisa Alpine

Dance

“i wish the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

Money, World, Food

“Church was doing what he often did when dropped - lying on his back with all four legs in the air, pretending to be dead in order to induce guilt in his owners.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Lying

“Now that I am dead, I know everything.”

Margaret Atwood book The Penelopiad

Source: The Penelopiad

“The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing this, he's dead.”

Bette Davis (1908–1989) film and television actress from the United States

Life, Motivational, Graduation

“But she's wrong about hell. You don't have to wait until you're dead to get there.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer book Life As We Knew It

Source: Life As We Knew It

Hell, Waiting

“You hate change. I hate it too. But things can't stay the same- and that's well, for when nothing changes in your life, it's as good as being dead”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Hero of Ages

Life, Hate, Change

“Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.”

Gabrielle Zevin (1977) American writer

Source: All These Things I've Done

“The human body is an amazing organism. It can go from dead tired to completely alert in a terrified blink.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Questing Beast

“You…" The centaur's eyes flared like a cornered animal's. "You should be dead.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

Animals

“The rain to the wind said,
'You push and I'll pelt.'
They so smote the garden bed.
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged -- though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Variant: The rain to the wind said,
You push and I'll pelt.'
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged--though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.
Source: The Poetry of Robert Frost

Flowers

“For it must be very lonely being dead.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“everyone is dead and this is hell.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Hell