“It was indeed a dead grove, made up of the corpses of trees. Even the wood of these corpses was non-living, a deathly grey, silver-green, with peeling bark; and the bark had also flaked, shrivelling and simply sloughing off like dead skin. And arching along all the dead twigs, crawled a supple, clutching, lashing, bold convolvulus-serpent. It was her leaves which glowed a cheerful green on the dead branches, on all their agonizing bifurcations; it was her flowers which hung on the branches from clusters of tiny suckers and tentacles, astonishingly tender and serene. They were so alien to that austere and honest deathly sterility that they seemed almost dazzling. It was like an explosion of something splendid, like the sombre and magical secret of that dead river and its dry valley. There was something about that copse reminiscent of the hut on chickens' legs, or Koschei's hoard, or the field sown with dead men's bones.”

“You aren’t making art, you’re making corpses. Dead is dead.”

“Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.”

“Folks want to glow, to leave their worries and dead skin behind.”

“Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.”

“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.”

“A title as meaningless as the woman bearing it. The Empress—just another face she’d seen somewhere before, a mask behind which someone hid from mortality.
“No use hiding,” she whispered, frowning down at the dead leaves and branches around her. “No use.””

“Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.”

“He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.”

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