Quotes about the dead

page 9

“Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”

“So, have a little fun. Soon enough you'll be dead and burning in Hell with the rest of your family.”

“Something had been buried that was not yet dead.”

“The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.”

“Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.”

“It is good that a man's enemies want him dead, for it proves he has lived a life of worth.”

“Maryse sighed."Nothing conclusive. If only the dead could talk, eh, Lucian?”

“You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.”

“The little bit you and me might change the world," Malloy smiled, "it wouldnt show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We'd never see it."

"But it'd be there.”

“He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

“my hands dead
my heart dead
silence
adagio of rocks
the world ablaze
that's the best
for me.”

“We are not meant to die merely in order to be dead. God could not want that for the creatures to whom He has given the breath of life. We die in order to live.”

“The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive”

“Dead bodies didn't resemble unconscious ones; it was as if you could sense that something had fled from them, that some essential spark was now missing.”

“I tell you what's really ridiculous--going into a bookstore and there's all these books about yourself. In a way, it feels like you're already dead.”

“I was getting depressed. My life wasn't going anywhere. I needed something, the flashing of lights, glamour, some damn thing. And here I was, talking to the dead. I finished my first drink. The second was ready.”

“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”

“There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.”

“Within six months, if I am not dead, I shall have seen you again, madam--even if I have to overturn the world.”

“If you meet a woman of whatever complexion who sails her life with strength and grace and assurance, talk to her! And what you will find is that there has been a suffering, that at some time she has left herself for hanging dead.”

“So go out and live real good and I promise you'll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you're dead, you'll be rotted away anyway. It's not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn't live.”

“There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, "" Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, "Wha—?”

“No one knows why, but second only to eating the brains of the living, the dead love affordable prefab furniture.”

“One could argue that it's romantic to die for love. Of course, then you're dead and unable to take that honeymoon trip to the Alps with all the other fashionable young couples, which is a shame.”

“One more dance along the razor's edge finished. Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today.”

“Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.”

“I hope you feel better today. Please ring me at work if you are dead.”

“The dead are never far from us. They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.”

“It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.”

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

“Valkyrie, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your friend is most likely dead.”
“Of course he’s dead. He’s a skeleton.”

“Fang was going to kill me. And after I was dead, he would kill me again.”

“People who say not to speak ill of the dead are hypocrites, because you can take it ot the bank they're thinking ill.”

“Most people call it The Book of the Dead,” he told me. “Rich Egyptians were always buried with a copy, so they could have directions through the Duat to the Land of the Dead. It’s like an Idiot’s Guide to the Afterlife.”

“You may have the worst timing since Napoleon decided the dead of winter was the right moment to invade Russia.”

“Honor is a fool's prize. Glory is of no use to the dead.”

“I’m in a shallow hole, not filled with the humming orange bubbles of my hallucination but with old, dead leaves.”

“One more drink and you're dead. This is no way to talk to a suicide head.”

“Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery?”

“Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be.”

“I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.”

“A working brain is probably a lot like a map, where anybody can get from one place to another on the freeways. It's the nonworking brains that get blocked, that have dead ends, that are under construction like mine.”

“Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.”

“Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.”

“I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.”

“Things change whether you want them to, or not--unless you are dead. Don't hold so hard to the past that you die with it.”

“Shall we never never get rid of this Past?… It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.”

“If the living are haunted by the dead. Then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.”

“Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?”

“Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.”

“He had followed the trail left by a dead man. It was only now that he realized it might lead only to a grave.”

“In a calm, clear voice, she suggested that the wyrsa in question could do several highly improbable, athletically difficult and possibly biologically impractical things involving its own mother, a few household implements, and a dead fish.”

“I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.”

“What they forget is that, from Ancient Greece on, the people who returned from battle were either dead on their shields or stronger, despite and because of their scars.”

“I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)”

“Name none of the fallen, for they stand in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.”

“Oh, how a small portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living!”

“If he had any kind of a clue, he wouldn’t be caught dead with that stuff. See what I did there? I crack myself up.” Eve sipped more coffee she probably, at this point, didn’t need.”

“we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure.”

“Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.”

“There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.”

“Do you know what most people have from their grandmother? A tea set. Or a quilt.” Curran smiled. “If your family had a quilt, it would be made out of chimera skin and stuffed with feathers from dead angels.”

“To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.”

“There was nothing like having a dead husband return from the grave to ruin a fine spring morning.”

“O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude…”

“It is not everyone,' said Elinor, 'who has your passion for dead leaves.”

“To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.”

“A man’s emotions are what define him, and control is the hallmark of true strength. To lack feeling is to be dead, but to act on every feeling is to be a child.”

“And you are mine, and you will be mine. They
will not get you. - Eric from Dead and Gone”

“There. She had thanked Sebastian. She waited for a bolt of lightning to shoot out of the clouds and striker her dead. But nothing happened.”

“I thought you were dead."
Magnus smiled crookedly. "What, from that scratch?" He glanced down at the reddening jacket in Alec's hand. "Okay, a deep scratch. Like, from a really, really big cat.”

“I'm sorry you don't get it, Mom. Sometimes I don't get why I do the things I do. I just know I wake up every morning and wish I was dead.”

“We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.”

“I'm Irish!… When I feel well I feel better than anyone, when I am in pain I yell at the top of my lungs, and when I am dead I shall be deader than anybody.”

“I hoped I wasn't actually dead. That would make finding our parents and saving the world really hard.”

“Jesse, this is Craig. Craig, Jesse. You two should get along. Jesse's dead,
too.”

“I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again…”

“Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.”

“You can't argue with the dead, no matter what you say, they always have the last word.”

“As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future --
a terrible festival of dead leaves.”

“Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”

“You are not Dostoevsky,' said the woman…
'You never can tell…' he answered.
'Dostoevsky is dead,' the woman said, a bit uncertainly.
'I protest!' he said with heat, 'Dostoevsky is immortal!”

“Ah, but she was a pastel wearer. She was forever dead to Sabine.”

“It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.”

“I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.”

“I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape---the lonliness of it---the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it---the whole story dosen't show.”

“More minions!” he shouted. “Come to me!”
That couldn’t be good. Another round of giant crocs and we’d be dead.
Why don’t we get minions? I complained to Horus, but he didn’t answer.”

“I’m talking to you more than I speak with my mahmen.”
“I thought your mother was dead.”
“She is.”
“You have a very low standard for communication.”

“Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.”

“The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.”

“It is only the dead who do not return.”

“Shane held the jewelry at arm's length, dangling it like a dead rat. "No way in hell am I caught dead or alive wearing that.”

“What I saw was more than I could stand. The noise I heard had been made by Little Ann. All her life she had slept by Old Dan's side. And although he was dead, she had left the doghouse, had come back to the porch, and snuggled up by his side.”

“the only perfect people are dead people, because their the only ones who can't make mistakes!”

“I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.”

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”

“The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.”

“Oh, sure. Of course, they say now that we’ve got Freud and the motorcar, God is dead.”

“He’s not dead; just very tired.”

“The only way that I could figure they could improve upon Coca-Cola, one of life's most delightful elixirs, which studies prove will heal the sick and occasionally raise the dead, is to put bourbon in it.”