c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
It wasn’t one event, but a series of events followed by years of research adjudicated by panels of experts and committees of laypeople until a decision was finally made: we’ve been going about handling dead people all wrong.
— Eda J. Vor, Lay Her Ghosts to Rest
And out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
Sometimes things happen that give me cause to believe I no longer exist. Car park barriers which do not lift when I drive towards them, automatic doors which do not open automatically as I approach.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
he knew in his body, even if he hadn’t yet put it together in his mind, that in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.
— Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.
— Catherine Lacey, The Answers
The dead, Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, as you know.
— Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq
The dead speak to those who listen. Be quieter than even them.
— Kerri Maniscalco, Stalking Jack the Ripper
I felt dead and sick inside.
— Susan Hill, Mrs de Winter
I hate being in my shoes...I am a deadman there!
— Deyth Banger, Notes Of A Dead Man Sequel
Let the dead bury the dead...
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
He looked exactly the same when he was alive, only he was vertical.
— Jack Trevor Story, The Trouble with Harry
Love won't kill you.-Carla
— Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything
The Dead are a larger army than any ever assembled, and they follow no leader, fear no threat, and accept no bribe or compromise. The Dead are the silent majority, and should they ever decide to say something, it will be the new law of the land.
— Isaac Marion, The Burning World
Post a picture of you or of somebody and look... the days have been counted.
— Deyth Banger, 4 Hours
You can't lie to a dead person.They already know the truth.
— Anthony T. Hincks
They knew a lot, the dead. How many times had she said to Harry they were the world’s greatest untapped resource? It was true. All they’d seen, all they’d suffered, all they’d triumphed over – lost to a world in need of wisdom.
— Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels
So you want we to play a game?...Aha, I like that...!I FUCKING LOVE IT!
— Deyth Banger, It's not a happy
The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock
—  but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.
Three hundred and thirty-two kids between the age of one month and fourteen years had been confined within the FAYZ.One hundred and ninety-six eventually emerged.One hundred and thirty-six lay dead.Dead and buried in the town plaza.Dead and floating in the lake or on its shores.Dead in the desert.In the fields.Dead of battles old and recent. Of starvation and accident, suicide and murder.It was a fatality rate of just over 40 percent.
— Michael  Grant, Light
Hunter’s dead,” Taylor said without preamble. “It was these . . . these things. They came crawling up out of him and were eating him, oh God, I mean, it was like . . . I mean he was crying and Dekka prayed with him and he tried to fry his own brain just like he did with Harry only I guess it didn’t work, I guess he couldn’t do it, so Sam . . .” She swallowed. “Anyone have some water?”“What about Sam?” Astrid demanded.“He did it for him. Sam. I mean, he . . . Hunter was, you know . . . so Sam.” She pantomimed raising her hands, like Sam, like he would do when using his power.Astrid closed her eyes and crossed herself.“Rest in peace,” Edilio said and crossed himself as well.“Sam burned the boy?” Howard asked. Then, bitterly sarcastic said, “Yeah, you all pray to Jesus. Because Jesus is really providing a lot of help here. Sounds to me like Sam was the one doing what had to be done.
— Michael  Grant, Plague
You know because you’ve been it, and I know because I’m dead and it gives one such a wonderfully uncluttered perspective.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Stay in your boats,” Dahra said. “We’re still going to need food. Throw your fish onto the dock. I’ll get Albert to send someone here to collect it. Then go back out, row up the coast a little ways, and camp out.”“Camp out?” Quinn echoed.“Yes!”“You’re serious.”“No, it’s my idea of a joke, Quinn,” Dahra snapped. “Pookie just coughed up a lung and fell over dead. You understand what I’m saying? I mean he coughed his actual lungs out of his mouth.
— Michael  Grant, Plague
My love will last until I'm oldAnd even dead it won't grow cold.
— Suzie Wilde, The Book of Bera
Drake’s dead,” Astrid said. “Dead people don’t come back. Let’s not be ridiculous.”Howard made a derisive snort. “Okay. That’s as far as I go with you on this, Sammy boy.” He made a hand-washing gesture.Astrid slammed her palm on the table, surprising even herself. “Somebody better tell me what all these back-and-forth looks are about.”“Brittney,” Howard said, spitting the name out like it was poison. “She came back. Sam had her and stuck her with Brianna, and told me not to talk about it.”“Brittney?” Astrid said, confused.Howard said, “Yeah. You know, like dead-girl Brittney? Way dead? Dead a long time and buried a long time and suddenly she’s sitting in my house chatting? That Brittney.”“I’m still not…”“Well, Astrid,” Howard said, “I guess we just found the limits of your big old genius brain. Point is that someone who was very seriously dead is suddenly not so dead anymore.”“But…,” Astrid started. “But Drake…”“As dead as Brittney,” Howard said. “Which might be a slight problem, since Brittney isn’t exactly dead herself.
— Michael  Grant, Lies
Everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. Only the dead have no sensations.
— Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares
I should have asked, I guess,” he says. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”“What?”He rotates around on his butt to face me. Me on the sofa, him on the floor, looking up. “That I was going with you.”“What? We weren’t even talking about that! And why would you want to go with me, Evan? Since you think he’s dead?”“I just don’t want you to be dead, Cassie.
— Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave
Alex, please.”He balls his fists. “Stop saying my name. You don’t know me anymore.”“I do know you.” I’m still crying, swallowing back spasms in my throat, struggling to breathe. This is a nightmare and I will wake up. This is a monster-story, and he has come back to me a terror-creation, patched together, broken and hateful, and I will wake up and he will be here, and whole, and mine again. I find his hands, lace my fingers through his even as he tries to pull away. “It’s me, Alex. Lena. Your Lena. Remember? Remember 37 Brooks, and the blanket we used to keep in the backyard—”“Don’t,” he says. His voice breaks on the word.“And I always beat you in Scrabble,” I say. I have to keep talking, and keep him here, and make him remember. “Because you always let me win. And remember how we had a picnic one time, and the only thing we could find from the store was canned spaghetti and some green beans? And you said to mix them—”“Don’t.”“And we did, and it wasn’t bad. We ate the whole stupid can, we were so hungry. And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.” I’m gasping, feeling as though I am about to drown; I’m reaching for him blindly, grabbing at his collar.“Stop.” He grabs my shoulders. His face is an inch from mine but unrecognizable: a gross, contorted mask. “Just stop. No more. It’s done, okay? That’s all done now.”“Alex, please—”“Stop!” His voice rings out sharply, hard as a slap. He releases me and I stumble backward. “Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that—what we felt, what it meant—that’s done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.”“Alex!”He has started to turn away; now he whirls around. The moon lights him stark white and furious, a camera image, two-dimensional, gripped by the flash. “I don’t love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never loved you.”The air goes. Everything goes. “I don’t believe you.” I’m crying so hard, I can hardly speak.He takes one step toward me. And now I don’t recognize him at all. He has transformed entirely, turned into a stranger. “It was a lie. Okay? It was all a lie. Craziness, like they always said. Just forget about it. Forget it ever happened.”“Please.” I don’t know how I stay on my feet, why I don’t shatter into dust right there, why my heart keeps beating when I want it so badly to stop. “Please don’t do this, Alex.”“Stop saying my name.
— Lauren Oliver, Requiem
The simple truth is that the only real 'ex-gay' person is a dead gay person - and even then I am not too sure about the validity of that statement.
— Christina Engela, Demonspawn
Swearing, d’Angelo entered the elevator. Fortunately, that was also still in order. When he got to the bridge, everything looked pretty ordinary – except for the third body of the day, which was lying spread-eagled on the deck with an almost comical look of surprise on his face. Jang was dead, although d’Angelo couldn’t see the cause, but then, he was no doctor. He sighed dismally. Now he hadn’t a navigator either. Or a crew for that matter.
— Christina Engela, Blachart
Dear Matt, In less than a day, I’ ll be standing on the same sand you stood on so many times before. Well, not the same sand, with the tides and winds and erosion and all of that, but the same symbolic sand. I’m so excited and scared that I can’ t sleep – even though I have to wake up in five hours! You know, I saved every one of your postcards. They’re here in a box under my bed – all the little stories you sent, like little pieces of California. Like the beach glass you guys always brought me. Sometimes I dump it out on my desk and press my ear to the pieces, trying to hear the ocean. Trying to hear you. But you don’ t say anything. Remember how you’ d come back from your vacation on the beach and tell me what it really felt like? What the ocean sounded like at dawn when the beach was deserted? What your hair and skin tasted like after swimming in saltwater all day? How the sand could burn your feet as you walked on it, but if you stuck your toes in, it was cold and wet underneath? How you spent three hours sitting on Ocean Beach just to watch the sun sink into the water a million miles away? If I closed my eyes as you were talking, it was like I was there, like your stories were my stories. In many ways, I feel as if I have memories of you there, too. Do you think that’s crazy? Matt, please don’ t think badly about Frankie’s contest. It’s just a silly game. It’s so Frankie, you know? No, I guess you wouldn’ t. You’ d kill her if you did! She just misses you. We all do. I’ ll look out for her, though. I promise. Please watch over us tomorrow, and for the next few weeks while we’re away. You’ ll be in my thoughts the whole time, like always. I’m going to find some red sea glass for you. I miss you more than you could ever know. Love, Anna
— Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer
Tips for Writing: Here you are some tips for writing which are pretty impressive!Make a character who is like Gregory house… mainly pranks, jokes!Make the character so much to be incredible that… you decide to kill him.…Two are enough now on then we will eat ( 2 = dead)
— Deyth Banger
If you think that one day you gonna lose the all data, you are kind of right from point of view of dead, yeah you will lose it in your mind. Your mind doesn't come in heaven or hell, does it?From other point of view, from cyber point of view again yeah, you are right... one day everything dies.
— Deyth Banger
Daddy?”“I’m right here, baby.”Lumps form in my throat, going all the way down into the core of me.It’s his voice. His. Right there. I reach toward the doorknob but I don’t get to turn it.Nick smashes at me with his head, pushing against my lower jaw and cheek, like a blow. His muzzle moves my head away from the door. He presses his face in between me and the wood. Fur gets in my mouth. I spit it out and push at him.“That’s my dad. My dad.” I slap the door. “He’s on the other side. The pixies will get him.”Nick shows me his teeth.“I can’t lose him again, Nick.”The wolf snarls like he’s ready to bite. My head jerks back and away, but then I steady myself.“Get . . . out . . . of . . . the . . . way.”Pushing against his thick neck, I slam my hands against him over and over again, pummeling him. He doesn’t budge.“Move!” I order. “Move.”“Zara, is there a wolf in there with you? Do not trust him,” my dad’s voice says, calmly, really calmly.I grab a fistful of fur and freeze. All at once it hits me that something is not right. My dad would never be calm if I was in my bedroom with a wolf. He’d be stressed and screaming, breaking the door down, kicking it in like he did once when I was really little and had accidentally locked myself in the bathroom and couldn’t get the lock out of the bolt because it was so old. He’d kicked that door down, splintering the wood, clutching me to him. He’d kissed my forehead over and over again.“I’d never let anything happen to you, princess,” he’d said. “You’re my baby.”My dad would be kicking the door in. My dad would be saving me.“Let me in,” he says. “Zara . . .”Letting go of Nick, I stagger backward. My hands fly up to my mouth, covering it.Nick stops snarling at me and wags his fluffy tail.How would my dad know that it is a wolf in here and not a dog? How would he know that it isn’t pixies?I shudder. Nick pounds next to me, pressing his side against my legs. I drop my hands and plunge my fingers into his fur, burying them there, looking for something. Maybe comfort. Maybe warmth. Maybe strength. Maybe all three.
— Carrie Jones, Need
The dead shouldn’t cry, not even the lesser dead.
— Christopher Buehlman, The Lesser Dead
But when you make love, the dead stay close, fill the bed, lie along the bodies in tiers, sandwiching all their lives with yours.
— Jonis Agee, A .38 Special and a Broken Heart
Death actually never kills you, time does
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
Conflict occurs everywhere except in the cemetery. Everyone experiences conflict except the dead. Thankful for being alive...
— Assegid Habtewold, The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks: For Continued Success in Leadership
For a trial is initiated not to render justice but to annihilate the defendant.Even when the trial is of dead people, the point is to kill them off a second time: by burning their books; by removing their names from the schoolbooks; by demolishing their monuments; by rechristening the streets that bore their names.
— Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realised that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy – and all for naught. In a few years they’d all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.
— Edmund White, Our Young Man
Half awake and almost dead. But yet we were breathing and yet we were waiting...Waiting for a miracle to happen.
— M.L van de Weetering
If I was a nobody you wouldn't be so eager to see me dead. Just like these people you know that I am devoted to the truth. That is why you want to eliminate me." - Magda Searus
— Terry Goodkind, The First Confessor
The dead will not die completely till the day they are remembered by no one!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The dead” we say   as if speakingof “the people” whogave up on making historysimply to get throughSomething dense and null   groanwithout echo   undergroundand owl-voiced I cry Whoare these dead people theselovers who if ever didlisten no longer answer: We :
— Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
The dead must heed them.
— Terry Goodkind, The First Confessor
This was the threshold to the place of the dead.
— Terry Goodkind, The First Confessor
It's hard to run from checkmate, checkmate is like the dead... but it's possible to block it. Unfortunately dead you can't block it, but checkmate can be blocked, in such way so the player can't make it.
— Deyth Banger
Today here, then there, then DEAD (IT"S A FACT, you can't do anything just take it like this.... or be prepare for the worst. Who is prepared never get suprised easy!).
— Deyth Banger
When you are dead you are independent, when you are alive your always dependent. It really doesn't matter are you there or there there is somebody above you, always!
— Deyth Banger
We are all on the same tree on big and large, different levels and how far you go above as more you have to see, one wrong move you fall..., most cases you face the dead.
— Deyth Banger
Everyday somebody dies... in combat, in war in battle... in game everwhere... so far nowhere is safety as you think.... I can tell you fom here what you think is wrong.... (What can you do about that??)
— Deyth Banger
So you tied the dead to alive person and now...YOu have just prepared the alive to be the 5 victim!
— Deyth Banger
Fayez whistled low. “That is not dead which can eternal lie. Or, y’know, whatever.
— James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn
Unknown is interesting like the Dead zone... you never know where you will go.
— Deyth Banger
The guy snarled out a string of profanity describing his night with Conn's mother."Sounds about right," Conn said, but Matt didn't miss the glint in Conn's eye. "She's been dead for twenty years, but dead's probably the only way you get laid.
— Anne Calhoun, Under the Surface
We don't plan funerals till the body is dead.
— Nilesh Rathod, Destiny of Shattered Dreams
Three good men dead, to save a hedge knight's foot.
— George R.R. Martin, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
Two can keep secret if the one is dead. (A Good Marriage by Stephen King)
— Deyth Banger
No guilt or anger or longing changes that.
— Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
One thing left me, my dad died before few weeks and with the time will be very far... It will start with seconds, hours, days, weeks, months, years....My grandpa died this year, my grandpa other died somewhere in 2012-2013, my dog died 2014, Robin Williams died... Everyone dies, what I can do for that???
— Deyth Banger
Oh, oh, oh I'm so sorry for you... but the real truth is that you make this to happen. (Believe or not I definite like this!)
— Deyth Banger
My father used to say that stupid people think. (I really don't agree with him!)
— Deyth Banger
First comes the day, then the seconds of the event, then the days which become weeks, then the months, then the years.
— Deyth Banger
As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
You want to go out to dinner sometime?Sorry, no. I'm married, not hungry, infected with seven unknown diseases, gay, pregnant with lizards and clinically dead.
— Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 2: Lust for Life
For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it's always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what's dead is dead and no feather-dusters.
— Henry Miller, Black Spring
Why do the living assume the dead know better than we do? Like they gained some knowledge by dying, but why wouldn't they just be the same confused people they were before they died?
— Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot
We are born dead, and moreover we have long ceased to be the sons of living fathers; and we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it. Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
A moment in time is never dead.
— Khalid Masood
Ehe, 24 hours have gone from my father dead. It was yesterday, he suicided yesteday in the morning. Even and more than 24 hours!
— Deyth Banger
Graveyards exist because death exists? No! Graveyards exist because we want to know precisely the place of our dead!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I think ghostliness is a good quality. I pretend I'm dead all the time." "What?" He stopped rummaging through his locker to look at me full in the face a last."It helps me go to sleep," I said."That shows you don't know anything about death," Jonah said."Do you?" I asked. He hesitated before saying "I'm a g-g-g-ghost, aren't I?" "I think being dead might be nice. Restful.""Death is not restful. It's nothing.""That's what seems restful to me," I said. "The nothing. Not being here. Not being anywhere.
— Natalie Standiford, How to Say Goodbye in Robot
Oh no. He looks half-dead." Charlie's face paled as he eyed the trapper's wrist and the blood-soaked bandages."Indeed." Jackaby nodded. "And if we don't get him some proper attention soon, he'll be all dead.
— William Ritter, Beastly Bones
The hunter does not seek dead game.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
The only time you were safe was when you were dead.
— Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
We're better than Galileo. Because he's dead.
— Jenny  Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
Quinns always come at half price, about half the time, and half-naked, even during the colder half of winter. A Quinn is like a queen, but draggier, and cheaper to buy and use for personal gain, unless you’re suspicious that you’re poor and illiterate like Jarod Kintz, in which case Quinns could be the spirits of your dead relatives, come to haunt you until you gather a massive fortune through selling books on the internet, to send some back in time through a portal you bought from the NSA, so they would have lived better lives without having to move a finger for their fortune. Oh, yah, and since they aren’t - they’re blue, like smurfs, yet they turn purple whenever tickled on the belly, which is something they seem to rather dislike, since they start biting and scratching when it happens, for no good reason, I might add.
— Will Advise, Nothing is here...
Not everyone believes in ghost’s, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?“ She had shaken her head slowly. "Men and women who can’t get over the past,” Aunt Evie said. “That’s what ghost’s are. Not them.” She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. “The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.
— Stephen King, Needful Things
The best to do with a death was to move on from it.
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
The dead neither see nor ear.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .wrote Luc Berimont in 1940, in Reign of Darkness.I’ve always felt the greatest reluctance to go anywhere near, to touch, a fresh corpse. For me, it’s an unseemly thing. Useless. Hostile. Cunning. Dangerous. The ‘presence’ is much stronger, more perceptible one hour after death than one hour before. By my observation, this was not the case with Heisserer.He was entirely absent from his head, his hands,his quivering body. He was gone instantly, unburdened of his absurd life, released.
— Jacques Yonnet, Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City
The dead are emotionless.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
She who dies with the most toys is, nonetheless, still dead.
— Claudio Encarnacion Montero
O God bid my poor body to ariseOn that bright day triumphant through the skies!
— Timothy Salter
What does it matter what people do? At the end of the day we're all dead.
— Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
Being dead means never having to do anything sneaky.
— Lawrence Block, Burglars Can't Be Choosers
The next time you hear a person say, 'I don't have time' or 'I have no time,' Take a moment to be with them. Without time, that somebody becomes a nobody.
— J.R. Rim
Pluto is dead, I know as I observed the Terminator that was sent to kill it
— Steven Magee
They're dead. We're alive. We have things to do.
— Lauren DeStefano, Wither
There is no spoon.
— Jim Butcher, Ghost Story
No! no! My engagement is with no bride--the worms! the worms expect me! I am a dead man--I have been slain by robbers--my body lies at Wurtzburg--at midnight I am to be buried--the grave is waiting for me--I must keep my appointment!
— Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories
I have a swizzle stick shaped like a little monkey,” announced Rose. “Let’s help the dead man with his problem.
— Seanan McGuire, The Ghosts of Bourbon Street
Now, if you will excuse me, a dead woman is trying to convince me to drink something that comes in layers.
— Seanan McGuire, The Ghosts of Bourbon Street
But there are times to talk to the dead, times when the dead want to talk.
— Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau
Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .
— Luc Berimont
Achilles’ eyes lift. They are bloodshot and dead. “I wish he had let you all die.
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
When I am dead, I charge you to mingle our ashes and bury us together.
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free.
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
Achilles weeps. He cradles me, and will not eat, nor speak a word other than my name.
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
We're all dead...Some of us are just a little further along than others.
— Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave
In 1912, a man named Franz Reichelt jumped off the Eiffel Tower wearing a parachute suit he designed himself. He jumped to test his invention--he expected to fly--but instead he fell straight down, hitting the ground like a meteor and leaving a 5.9-inch-deep crater from the impact. Did he mean to kill himself? Doubtful. I think he was just cocky, and also stupid.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
— John Maynard Keynes
How can you kill a man who'd already been dead for years?
— Peter Hedges, What's Eating Gilbert Grape
I woke up every morning hoping to die and then spent the rest of the day wondering if maybe I was already dead because I couldn't even tell the difference.
— Taherah mafi
In this world, people always find a way of doing what they want
— Nikolai Gogol
compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams...
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
cadavers' intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs.....
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
We are all Dead, just not yet buried.
— Brandon Notch, Sacred Saint: American Dreamer
Metias is gone again. He is always gone.
— Marie Lu, Prodigy
He spiked the dirt, twisted out the deformed rose, tossed it aside. His palms sweated.'Sorry,' Persephone suggested.'Pardon?'She murmured, 'You should say sorry when you kill something.'It took him a moment to realize she meant the rose. 'It was dying anyway.''Dying and dead are different words.'Shamed, Adam muttered an apology....
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves
It's not unreal to me yet, though it might get that way soon. It still feels very real. And not even horrible -- the dead are just the dead. I am convinced that the living people they once were would have been proud of their protective bodies hoodwinking their murderers to save someone else. [..] But it's not civilized. There is something indecent about it -- really foully indecent. The civilized Rose-person in me, who still seems to exist beneath the layers of filth, knows this. [..] I have become so indifferent about the dead.
— Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire
It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.
— Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
Again he shook his head. The world's gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!
— Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
How fortunate, then, that we serve a God who quickens the dead. Who breathes life into the lifeless. Do you not think that a God who formed man out of dust can form a new creation in you?
— Roseanna M. White, A Soft Breath of Wind
Even the Dead Hunger for Life.
— Billy VanOrsdol
He glanced nervously over his shoulder with a remarkable pair of codfish eyes.'Like a ’orrid movie I saw once in Canarsie. Bunch o’ lunks set off on a cruise to nowhere, just like this, and wot do you suppose they all was?''What?''Dead.''How?''Dead as mutton, only they didn’t know it.
— Rufus King
The dead are practical.
— Tim W. Burke, The Flesh Sutra
There is a great deal to be saidFor being dead.
— E. Clerihew Bentley
Take care of your dog because a dead dog is NOT a fun companion!
— Darlene Arden
I see ghosts like you see a normal person. Looking regular, tangible as ever and even more alive than most of the people you’ll see walking around the streets.
— Tia Artemis, The Death's Daughter
If Metias joined the Patriots, he'd be a Hacker too. If he were alive.
— Marie Lu, Prodigy
I often think about this, that is, I imagine to myself that here is Vera, dead, totally motionless, lying on the table, in a coffin... and I too, of course can no longer live. But for some reason this gives me pleasure, a terrible amount of pleasure to imagine so the one I love: earlier I imagined grandmother and then my fiance in this manner, even my favorite animals, Sparky our cat with the fiery bursts of red on his gray-black fur.("Thirty-Three Abominations")
— Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
Can you really talk to the dead?" She gave me the look that I was familiar with by now: equal parts derision, skepticism, and curiosity. “How much would it be? I mean, how much do you charge?
— Amy LaPalme, AfterLife
How could we have been afraid of her? She was only dead. It’s the living we fear.
— Mercedes Lackey, Oathbreakers
I am a dead woman. Dead and insane.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl
As my hand found his, bitter salt tears spilled from my eyes, in sorrow and pain and regret that I had so utterly failed him.
— Kim Harrison, For a Few Demons More
What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?
— Peter Watts, Blindsight
The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.
— Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies
War limits the deads. It limits them to the cimetery ... (La guerre limite les morts. - Les limite au cimetière...)
— Charles de Leusse
I was one of those unfortunates adopted by upper middle-class professionals and nurtured in an environment of learning, art and a socio-religious culture steeped in more than 2000 years of Talmudic tradition. Not everyone is lucky enough to have been raised in a whiskey tango trailer park by a bow-legged female whose sole qualification for motherhood is a womb that happened to catch a sperm of a passing truck driver.
— Generation Kill
It is seriously creepy when you receive a friend request from a dead friend in social media asking you to accept.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
I don't see the point in worrying now that I a half-dead and not when I was okay.
— Arely Martinez Garcia
The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star...
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.We have time to grow old.The air is full of our cries.But habit is a great deadener.At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing.Let him sleep on.
— Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story -- the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.
— Hugh Howey, Dust
Great
—  I get to be told I am dead all over again. -Stomfur
Hours of being asked:"Do you understand?" But for all of her answers, she never got around the one question I had wanted to ask."What does it feel like?
— Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds
But tears don't bring back the dead. I learned that.
— Moira Young, Rebel Heart
I don't want to see no dead body. Willie ain't in there. She put her walkin' shoes on. She gone to see the Lord.
— Ruta Sepetys, Out of the Easy
Well, if you’d let me explain before you went bolting outta the room, then you’d know, wouldn’t you? It seems to me that you’re quite dead. So I’ve come to collect you.” –Sam
— Nessie Strange, Living Dead Girl
Oh, God,” Magnus said. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
I must be alive," Gawain said hoarsely. "Dead doesn't hurt this much.
— Gerald Morris, Parsifal's Page
Music without passion is merely noise. A life without passion? You may as well be dead.
— Rachel Van Dyken, Toxic
In short, you had that particular ability which I never had: the ability to be alive.
— Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse
There is a festival where we wear the faces of demons to ward evil spirits from our dead in the vale. Sometimes wefail.
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
I was dead unit you found me, though I breathed. I was sightless, though I could see. And then you came...and I was awakened.
— J.R. Ward, Lover Awakened
The American dream is what has kept Americans from rebelling against corporate corruption.Now that 2/3 of us know it's dead, expect anything.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
I think the best shaped box ever on earth is a coffin which can be handmade to escort the forever numb-hands.
— Munia Khan
Alas! he is cold, he cannot answer me.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
The mist enveloped her form. She was lifted into it, then instantly dropped. Swiftly, the mist retreated to the window.It was gone. The old woman lay flat on her back, eyes open and staring; her mouth open, too, unprettily.That was the over-all effect - the utter lack of anything beautiful.("The Witch")
— A.E. van Vogt, Zacherley's Vulture Stew
People don't want the truth when they ask how you're doing after you lost your brother.
— Jolene Perry, My Heart for Yours
But it's fair to say that the war's [WWI] dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and gave those who were more or less dead the right to live. And if the war managed only to separate the living from the dead, then the new regime, arriving in its wake, would sooner or later pit them against each other as enemies.
— Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse
It's not good to dig in the past, raise the ghost up from the grave, and have it walk with the flesh.
— Anthony Liccione
And what we’ve been always been is…?”“Is living on borrowed time. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs … planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or…”“Course not, it’s a koan.
— Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
And it occurs to me that there’s no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it’s just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead.
— Rick Yancey
Words are dead, until action brings them life.
— Anthony Liccione
He was in Guanajuato, Mexico, he was a writer, and tonight was the Day of the Dead ceremony. He was in a little room on the second floor of a hotel, a room with wide windows and a balcony that overlooked the plaza where the children ran and yelled each morning. He heard them shouting now. And this was Mexico's Death Day. There was a smell of death all through Mexico you never got away from, no matter how far you went. No matter what you said or did, not even if you laughed or drank, did you ever get away from death in Mexico. No car went fast enough. No drink was strong enough.("The Candy Skull")
— Ray Bradbury
I understood that to live is to be free ... that to have friends is necessary ... that to fight is to stay alive ... that to be happy you just need to want ... I learned that time heals ... that the grudge disappears ... that disappointment does not kill ... that today is a reflection of yesterday. I understood that we can cry without shedding tears ... that true friends remain ... what a pain strengthens ... what to win magnifies... I learned that dreaming is not fantasize ... that to smile you have to make someone smile ... that beauty is not what we see, but what we feel ... that the value is in the strength of achievement ... I realized that words have power ... that to accomplish is better than to talk ... that the look does not lie ... that living is learning from mistakes ... I learned that everything depends on the will ... that the best is to be ourselves ... that the SECRET of life is LIVE! ""And one of the things I learned is that one should live though. Although, one must eat. Although, we must love. Although, it must die. Even it is often the very although that pushes us forward. It was the despite of that gave me an anguish that unsatisfied was breeder my own life.
— Pedro Bial
Stay back,"I warned. "Stay away from him." They kept coming. "Stay back!" I yelled. They stopped. Except for one. "Rose," came a soft voice. "Drop the sword." My hands shook. I swallowed. "Get away from us." "Rose." The voice spoke again, a voice that my soul would have known anywhere. Hesitantly, I let myself finally become aware of my surroundings, let the details sink in. I let my eyes focus on the features of the man standing there. Dimitri's brown eyes, gentle and firm, looking down on me. "It's okay," he said. "Everything's going to be okay. You can let go of the sword." My hands shook even harder as I fought to hold on to the hilt. "I can't." The words hurt coming out. "I can't leave him alone. I have to protect him." " you have," said Dimitri. The sword fell out of my hands, landing with a clatter on the wooden floor. I followed, collapsing on all fours, anything to cry but unable to. Dimitri's arms wrapped around me as he helped me up. Voices swarmed around us, and one by one, I recognised people I knew and trusted.
— Richelle Mead, Frostbite
A child is not an adult, a child didn't ask to be here. Any man that doesn't take care of his responsibilities to his family and to his children, do me a favor STOP calling yourself a man..at least have the decency to admit that you're a boy. You don't know what manhood is.
— Stephen A. Smith
Is it true, then, Mayor?" Grandmother Miss Lacy Thornton warbled from the end of the counter. "Is Jesse Tatum officially dead?""Dead is such an unflattering term," he said, sliding onto his stool. "I prefer to think of Jesse as... passe."The Azalea Women gasped."What's passe mean?" Tinks Williams asked the Colonel, his voice low."Dead," the Colonel said, refilling Tink's iced tea.
— Sheila Turnage, Three Times Lucky
Most artists weren't famous until they died (mostly because once they'd died they couldn't create any more art, so it would make it more valuable).
— Sariah Wilson, The Ugly Stepsister Strikes Back
The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
— Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love
Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic
— James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life
Being certain one is alive isn't something to which one pays mind. If you could ask the question, you were fine. If you could not, hopefully you had a cozy coffin.
— Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows
She felt as if the grave stones were whispering those names to her as she walked past... Those stones that bore no names seemed like closed mouths, sad mouths that forgotten how to speak. But perhaps the dead didn't mind what their names had once been?
— Cornelia Funke
The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.
— William Lloyd Garrison
There’s no getting better, Storm. This is it.” There’s no coming back from the dead.
— K.A. Tucker, Ten Tiny Breaths
Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
How quickly the dead faded into each other,
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
The thing about coming back from the dead was that your life went on.
— Brian McGreevy, Hemlock Grove
Whatever she is now she's better than she was," said Bedloe. "Being dead is better than being dull, being dead is better than not being aware.
— Ray Bradbury, A Pleasure to Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories
He held up his hands in surrender. “I’m not here to start trouble. I am just doing some research for my thesis.”“If you don’t get out of this bar, you are going to be writing your thesis via Ouija board.
— Jessica Fortunato, Nocturnal Embers
(ghost of)ACHILLES: How can I force obedience on this? In other times I've used the fear of death to make a woman bow herself to me. If not the fear of her own death, then fear for someone else, a husband or a child. How can I bend this woman to my will?(ghost of)POLYXENA: I think I will not bend.IPHIGENIA: You see, it's as we've tried to tell you, Great Achilles. Women are no good to you dead.
— Sheri S. Tepper, The Gate to Women's Country
My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. I'm not what you'd call choosy.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
A hero is not measured by the lives that he has saved. A hero is measured by the number of the dead that he did not join.
— Robert J.A. Gilbert, Men of Renown
It had been a couple of years and I was neither dead, nor undead, which I ranked as an achievement.
— Mark Henwick, Sleight of Hand
There was something dead in my heart.I tried to figure out what it was by the strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse.I had a dead mouse in my heart.
— Richard Brautigan, The Tokyo-Montana Express
Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
The dead don't stay dead in this town! Haunted Richmond II-Pamela K. Kinney
— Pamela K. Kinney
The Romans feared their dead. In fact, Roman funeral customs derived from a need to propitiate the sensibilities of the departed. The very word funus may be translated as dead body, funeral ceremony, or murder. There was a genuine concern that, if not treated appropriately, the spirits of the dead, or manes, would return to wreak revenge
— Catharine Arnold, Necropolis: London and Its Dead
The faithful clamoured to be buried alongside the martyrs, as close as possible to the venerable remains, a custom which, in anthropological terms, recalls Neolithic beliefs that certain human remains possessed supernatural properties. It was believed that canonized saints did not rot, like lesser mortals, but that their corpses were miraculously preserved and emanated an odour of sanctity, a sweet, floral smell, for years after death. In forensic terms, such preservation is likely to be a result of natural mummification in hot, dry conditions.
— Catharine Arnold, Necropolis: London and Its Dead
Meanwhile, we have carved out a place for ourselves among the dead; the glittering pinnacles of commerce rise along the skyline, their foundations sunk in a charnel house; and the lost lie forgotten below us as, overhead, we persaude ourselves that we are immortal and carry on the business of life.
— Catharine Arnold, Necropolis: London and Its Dead
One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque cone of smoke. And then night and extinction – nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.
— H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
Thank you, Dr. Phil, for that fine psychological assessment," I snapped and motioned my chin to Disco. "Why don't you and Oprah here go take a long walk off a short plank and do the world a favor?
— J.A. Saare
Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn't think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books.
— Lavie Tidhar, The Bookman
I've always found that the most beautiful people, truly beautiful inside and out, are the ones who are quietly unaware of their effect." His eyes searched mine intently, and for a moment we stood there toe to toe. "The ones who throw their beauty around, waste what they have? Their beauty is only passing. It's just a shell hiding nothing but shadows and emptiness.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Obsidian
If you run from me, I will chase you, and I'll find you....
— Jeaniene Frost, Halfway to the Grave
Percy (to Annabeth): If I was going to pick one person in the world to reattach my head, I'd pick you.Silena: Awww . . . Percy, that is so sweet!Annabeth: Shut up, Silena.
— Rick Riordan
She stood in his kitchen, watching him toy with the ring in his lip. It wasn't quite that he was biting it, but sucking it into his mouth. He did that when he was concentrating. It isn't sexy. He's not sexy. But he was, and she was staring at him like a fool. "wow" she whispered (.....)"Wow, huh?" His voice was low, husky. His chair creaked as he stood. His footsteps seemed strangely loud as he closed the couple yards between them. Then he was beside her. "I can work with wow
— Melissa Marr, Wicked Lovely
Look at the time." I tipped my chin toward the clock. "It's past midnight. It's January second. You lost."For several moments he stared at the clock like it was an Arum he was about to blast into the next county and then his eyes found mine. Daemon smiled. "No. I didn't lose. I still won.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Onyx
Okay, this was kissing. Serious kissing. Not just a kiss before moving out, not a good-bye, this was Hello, sexy, and wow, she’d never even suspected that it could feel this way.
— Rachel Caine, Glass Houses