“But now she was fifty-seven, and suddenly ancient. Soon she would be dead. Dead. You can’t get any more ancient than that.”

“To be without music was, for the ancient Greeks, to be already dead… Ancient Greece was a culture of song.”

“The ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.”

“Suddenly Corbell missed Mirabelle terribly. He mourned her, not because she was dead, but because she was gone.”

“The Suicide, as she is falling,
Illuminated by the moon,
Regrets her act, and finds appalling
The thought she will be dead so soon.”

“Well, she's not responding to my advances," he observed more brightly than he felt, "so she must be dead."
"Or she's a woman of good taste and sense.”

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

“She said, "Welcome to the land of the living dead," but you could tell she was so brokenhearted — she said, "Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt."”

“But the more times she missed, the faster she’d be traveling when she finally slammed into the mast. And it wasn’t if she hit the mast; it was when. At that point, Abby would be either severely injured or dead.”

“She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”