Popular quotes about Dead! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 38
When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.
Jennifer EganIโm going to kill myself. I should go to Paris and jump off the Eiffel Tower. Iโll be dead. you know, in fact, if I get the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier, which would be perfect. Or wait a minute. It -- with the time change, I could be alive for six hours in New York but dead three hours in Paris. I could get things done, and I could also be dead.
Woody AllenWhatever alleged 'truth' is proven by results to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage!
Anton Szandor LaVeyReligion in the West has a very wrong connotation. It has almost reached to a point where the very word 'religion' creates a repulsion, where the very word 'religion' reminds one of dead churches and dead priests. It reminds one of serious looking people, long faces. It has lost the capacity to dance, to sing, to celebrate. And when a religion has lost the capacity to dance, to celebrate, to sing, to love, just to be, then it is no more religion - it is a corpse, it is theology. Theology is dead religion.
RajneeshAre they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?
Henry Ward BeecherThe reason why congregations have been so dead is, because they had dead men preaching to them. O that the Lord may quicken and revive them! How can dead men beget living children?
George WhitefieldA considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror.
G. I. GurdjieffThe moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.
Oriana FallaciI was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and Iโm not feeling so well myself.
Mark TwainI don't know how I made those movies. I went out every single night, I smoked pot every single day. I drank. We did everything, but I never became a drug addict or an alcoholic. Other friends are dead, many of them. So many people in this retrospective...in Female Trouble, almost everyone is dead.
John WatersUntil the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons.
Ernest HemingwaySo now I have sworn to bury All this dead body of hate I feel so free and so clear By the loss of that dead weight
Alfred Lord TennysonI believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.
Jack LondonOdd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.
Jeanette WintersonThe border between the dead and the living, if you're Mexican, doesn't exist. The dead are part of your life.
Sandra CisnerosWhen ignorant people see someone who is dead, they are disgusted and horrified, even thought they too will be dead some day. I thought to myself: I don't want to be like the ignorant people. After then, I couldn't feel the usual intoxication with life anymore.
Gautama BuddhaThings can be funny only when we are in fun. When we're 'dead earnest,' humor is the only thing that is dead.
Flip WilsonHerman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isnโt either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is โ profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.
Susan HoweThere are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.
T. S. EliotIt is my judgment that any man or woman can do more to conform to the laws of God in one year in this life than they could do in ten years when they are dead. The spirit can only repent and change, and then the battle has to go forward with the flesh afterwards. It is much easier to overcome and serve the Lord when both flesh and spirit are combined as one. This is the time when men are more pliable and susceptible. We will find when we are dead every desire, every feeling will be greatly intensified. When clay is pliable it is much easier to change than when it gets hard and sets.
Melvin J. BallardTake the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.
Stephen KingChrist quickens none but the dead. Why do not the papists attain to this grace of justification? They never see themselves wholly dead, but join some life to the natural estate of man. Therefore Christ quickens them not.
Richard SibbesNo poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T. S. EliotOn a day of burial there is no perspective--for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was--to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.
Antoine de Saint-ExuperyOne fine day, in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other. They pulled out their swords and shot one another. One deaf cop, on the beat heard the noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.
Holly BlackI felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die.
Mark TwainIf you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have diffuculty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.
Ralph Waldo EmersonI often think it would be really interesting to take all of those who would wage war to the battlefield cemeteries, and say, explain yourself to the dead. Explain yourself to the dead!
Jacqueline WinspearSome day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
Irvin D. YalomI read the story and reread the story, but I still could not find the universality that the little Irishman had spoken of. All I saw in the story was some Irishmen meeting in a room and talking politics. What had that to do with America, especially with my people? It was not until years later that I saw what he meant ... I began to listen, to listen closely to how they talked about their heroes, to how they talked about the dead and how great the dead had once been. I heard it everywhere.
Ulysses S. GrantIt's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.
Joyce Carol OatesThe way is shut. It was made by those who are Dead, and the Dead keep it, until the time comes. The way is shut.
J. R. R. TolkienShe's not here," I tell him. Buttercup hisses again. "She's not here. You can hiss all you like. You won't find Prim." At her name, he perks up. Raises his flattened ears. Begins to meow hopefully. "Get out!" He dodges the pillow I throw at him. "Go away! There's nothing left for you here!" I start to shake, furious with him. "She's not coming back! She's never ever coming back here again!" I grab another pillow and get to my feet to improve my aim. Out of nowhere, the tears begin to pour down my cheeks. "She's dead, you stupid cat. She's dead.
Suzanne CollinsIf the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.
Chuck PalahniukOur dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.
George EliotLet him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only change of worlds.
Chief Seattle"Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention.
Andre GideThe days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:โagainst whom, against whom?
Erich Maria RemarqueI'm not human, Ms. Deveraux. In case you haven't noticed, I'm one of the damned. (Valerius) Baby, open your eyes and look around. We're all damned in one way or another. But damned is a far cry from dead. And you live like you're dead. (Tabitha) I'm that, too. (Valerius)
Sherrilyn KenyonI g-g-guess...I'm dead?" she heard her own voice call out, strangely high-pitched and thin. For a long time, she heard nothing else. And then: "Hi, Dead. I'm Dan.
Peter LerangisI never thought before, that there was a woman in the world who could affect me so much by saying so little. But don't be hard in your construction of me. You don't know what my state of mind towards you is. You don't know how you haunt and bewilder me. You don't know how the cursed carelessness that is over-officious in helping me at every other turning of my life WON'T help me here. You have struck it dead, I think, and I sometimes wish you had struck me dead along with it.
Charles DickensBut you're dead," said Harry. "Oh yes," said Dumbledore matter-of-factly. "Then...I'm dead too?" "Ah," said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. "That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.โ They looked at each other, the old man still beaming. "Not?" repeated Harry. "Not," said Dumbledore. "Butโฆ" Harry raised his hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. "But I should have diedโI didn't defend myself! I meant to let him kill me!" "And that," said Dumbledore, "will, I think, have made all the difference.
J. K. RowlingThere are plenty of dates that are dead nights that you could do. There are plenty evenings that are dead nights that you could have the debates in.
Donald TrumpThe tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.
P. D. JamesIt wasn't awful to be dead. The stillness would almost be a relief. She wouldn't want pain, she wouldn't want to be wounded or mutilated. She could never shoot herself or jump off a building. But being dead wasn't unthinkable.
Janet FitchHere's a newsflash from the only High Preistess you have left at this dang school: Zoey isn't dead. And believe me, I know dead. I've been there, done that, and got the frickin' T-shirt." - Stevie Rae
P. C. CastAnd little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man's thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happening that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.
Lord Dunsany