
“It is better to be a lively frump than a stylish corpse.”
Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XXIII : “The farce is over.”, p. 212
Stuttgart. After 8th September 1831.
Source: "Selected Correspondence Of Fryderyk Chopin"; http://archive.org/stream/selectedcorrespo002644mbp/selectedcorrespo002644mbp_djvu.txt
“It is better to be a lively frump than a stylish corpse.”
Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XXIII : “The farce is over.”, p. 212
“I am glad to be a maggot in the corpse which is the world.”
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
“I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.”
Source: My Name is Red
To Leon Goldensohn, April 9, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
“Without madness what is man
more than the healthy beast,
corpse adjourned that procreates?”
Poem "D. Sebastião", verses 8-10
Message
Original: Sem a loucura que é o homem
Mais que a besta sadia,
Cadáver adiado que procria?
Source: Poems of Fernando Pessoa
No quiero para mí tantas desgracias.
No quiero continuar de raíz y de tumba,
de subterráneo solo, de bodega con muertos
ateridos, muriéndome de pena.
Walking Around, Residencia II (Residence II), II, stanza 4-5.
Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
I do not want for myself so many misfortunes.
I do not want to continue as root and tomb,
just underground, a vault with corpses
stiff with cold, dying of distress.
Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth) (1933)
“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”
George Bernard Shaw, quoted by Hesketh Pearson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, 1942
1940s and later
The Silver Pigs