Blessed Are The Dead Quotes

I've been keeping in stuff worse than that for more than twenty years."
- what the serial killer said to me. Based the antagonist in my novel on him. He's dead now. ~ Kristi Belcamino

Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint. ~ Edward Thomas

I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…

The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone.

The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: 'Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on. ~ Edward Thomas

I have some crack sources - cops who call me, and say, "Hey, there's a dead body in Civic Park, try not to beat the homicide detectives there."
- Gabriella Giovanni, BLESSED ARE THE DEAD ~ Kristi Belcamino

The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics argue that you can twist time and space, that something can appear out of nothing, and that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. This makes a mockery of our common sense, yet nobody seeks to protect innocent schoolchildren from these scandalous ideas. Why? The theory of relativity makes nobody angry, because it doesn't contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don't care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well, be my guest. Go ahead and bend them. What do I care? In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Hey! Back off from the dead girl. She's Resistance property." "Yeah," says his twin brother Dum from inside the cab. "We need her for autopsies and stuff. You think girls killed by demon princes are easy to find?" As ~ Susan Ee

The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."
...
We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that. ~ Lorrie Moore

Are you sometimes scared, or happy, just like that, out of the blue, apropos of nothing? You hurry out on some stupid errand, and suddenly you feel a thrill of improbablem intense, boundless joy? Or it happens that everything seems to be in its rightful placem your beloved is sleeping sweetly next to you, you're young and full of as much energy as a puppy - and suddenly you feel you're suspended in emptiness, and a leaden sorrow clamps down on your heart, as though you were dead. Not only that, but as though you had never been alive. And sometimes you look at yourself in the mirror, and you can't remember who that chap is, or why he's there at all. Then your own reflection turns around and walks away, and you watch silently as it retreats. [..] It happens because something ineffable is reaching for us - we never know where and when it will show up and start tugging on our sleave. ~ Max Frei

...the Kabbalist was interested not in the perfected text whose author is dead and can no longer respond but in contact with the living Author for whom the text is an intermediary. Even when the pneuma was needed in order to better understand the Bible, the content of this deeper apprehension was, in many cases, a better insight into divine matters. According to the French philosopher, the death of the author is a condition for finalizing the text and rendering it into a static perfection, allowing for a "complete" relation. This request is based upon a rigid attitude toward the contents, which are to be approached when they can no longer change. It is an axiom of the Kabbalists that the sacred text is in an ongoing process of change, evidently a symptom of its inherent infinity and divinity. For them, Scripture is a way of overcoming the post-prophetic eclipse of revelation, an endeavor to recapture the presence of the Author and its nature; the biblical text produces a silent dialogue and eventually even union between Author and reader,.. ~ Moshe Idel

You are ashamed to open your Bible and read that blessed Psalm, "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want." You are ashamed to be seen on your knees. No man can be a disciple of Jesus Christ without bearing His cross. A great many people want to know how it is Jesus Christ has so few disciples, whilst Mahomet has so many. The reason is that Mahomet gives no cross to bear. There ~ D.L. Moody

Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead. ~ Richard Bach

Those occasional people who seem to achieve some kind of happiness here like your two dead colleagues, these are the things that Hell allows to flourish in tiny, stunted bursts, to make it immeasurably worse for everyone else. ~ Simon Kurt Unsworth

We cry for ourselves, don't we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring. ~ Clive Barker

Thy soul shall find itself alone
'Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.
Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness - for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee - and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still. [ ... ] ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire. ~ Walker Percy

Then you're seventy-five, friends are dead, and you've replaced at least one major organ: you have to pee four times a night, and you can't go up a flight a stairs without being little winded
and your're told you're in pretty good shape for your age.
[ ... ], in a decade you'll be eighty-five, and the only difference between you and a raisin will be that while you're both wrinkled and without a prostate, the raisin never had a prostate to begin with. ~ John Scalzi

The 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. Tolkien

And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 4:2-3) ~ Anonymous

I thought we weren't actually dead?", I asked. There was a lot of ambiguity surrounding that subject. We weren't mortal anymore. That was for sure. I could swing by my grave and prove that anytime I wanted. But, we had bodies with needs. And could get hurt or killed. And, though, I've been told we didn't age, my hair continued to grow. I still woke up hungry in the morning, and watch out, if I didn't get a cup of coffee. It was like we were straddling some invisible fence between immortality and human frailty.
"Seriously, are we dead or not? I asked again when I still received no response. I got several yes's and no's at the same time confirming my own belief. Somehow, we were neither. ~ Donna Augustine

White Mike was a thinker, his teachers said. This is what he was thinking as he watched his mother's coffin being lowered into the ground.

You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she's dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty.

That was what White Mike was thinking. ~ Nick McDonell

Men who have died in battle are rarely good to look upon. No matter how splendid their appearance at the apex of heroism, when the soul has fled it takes all grace and beauty with it. Bowels empty, mouths gape, bellies swell, dead eyes gleam fish-belly white. Nothing visible remains of glory. In the tents of death all men belong to the same tribe. ~ Morgan Llywelyn

We will have have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The dead and past stories that I have told again in divers fashions, are not set down without authority. ~ Marie De France

There are many things that you can avoid by just knowing something. Knowledge of self is the most notable knowledge I pursue. By knowing myself, I avoided dead dreams and a meaningless life. ~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

When I wake, I have a brief, delicious feeling of happiness that is somehow connected with Peeta. Happiness, of course, is a complete absurdity at this point, since at the rate things are going, I'll be dead in a day. And that's the best-case scenario, if I'm able to eliminate the rest of the field, including myself, and get Peeta crowned as the winner of the Quarter Quell. Still, the sensation's so unexpected and sweet I cling to it, if only for a few moments. Before the gritty sand, the hot sun, and my itching skin demand a return to reality. ~ Suzanne Collins

Love is: Bringing a blanket when someone's asleep. Giving the last piece of food to the other person. Staying awake to listen to them when you are dead tired. Hugging them tightly when they need it the most. ~ Carlos Salinas

Every year, in November, at the season that follows the hour of the dead, the crowning and majestic hours of autumn, I go to visit the chrysanthemums ... They are indeed, the most universal, the most diverse of flowers. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck

I feel like people are only really dead once you stop learning about them. This is why it is important to me to keep learning about my mother, and what she wanted, and what her life meant, what she meant by the life she led. Then she will be alive, somehow, and her wish for me will have come true. My vow is to learn more about her. To see her as she saw herself. ~ Liz Moore

He may make me feel like a fool, and like a woman who can do nothing, but what I can do I will. In my jewellery box is a dark locket of black tarnished silver and inside it locked in the darkness, I have his name: Richard Neville and that of George, Duke of Clarence, written in my blood on a piece of paper from the corner of my father's last letter. These are my enemies, I have cursed them. I will see them dead at my feet. ~ Philippa Gregory

A Rare Commodity A man's pride will bring him low, but a humble spirit will obtain honor. PROVERBS 29:23 Humility isn't a show we put on; in fact, if we think we're humble, we're probably not. And in our day of self-promotion, self-assertion, spotlighting "celebrities of the faith," and magnifying the flesh, this quality - so greatly valued by the Lord Jesus - is a rare commodity indeed ... A truly humble person looks for opportunities to give himself freely to others rather than holding back, to release rather than hoarding, to build up rather than tearing down, to serve rather than being served, to learn from others rather than clamoring for the teaching stand. How blessed are those who learn this early in life. Hope Again ~ Charles R. Swindoll

Is there something you are allowing to escape your grasp or to expire that was clearly within our reach? Are you stuck with the mentality that if God wants you to have it, He'll give it to you? Or if its meant to be, it will be? Don't fool yourself; Nothing just happens! There is a cause and effect to everything in life and you need to be an active participant in the creation of your destiny. Becoming a silent partner with God is still not enough because faith without works is dead. ~ Dwaun S. Cox

We are gathered here, friends," he said, "to honor lo Hoon-yera
Mora-toorz tut Zamoo-cratz-ya, children dead, all dead, all murdered
in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men.
I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that in the same
war in which lo Hoon-yera Mora-toorz tut Zamoo-cratz-ya died, my
own son died.

"My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.

"I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to
die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they
do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of
patriotic holidays.

"But they are murdered children all the same.

"And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the
hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the
day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and
viciousness of all mankind.

"Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes
and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like
pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and
shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

"I do not mean to be ungrateful for the fine, martial show we are about
to see - and a thrilling show it really will be . . ."

He looked each of us in the eye, and then he commented very softly, ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

We aren't haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we'd be to them. ~ Rebecca Makkai

The greatest danger in life is not taking chances. There are so many negative people wanting to grind you down, but you can't let them. If people say you are mad, you know you're on the right track. ~ Brian Blessed

I duly acknowledge that I have gone through a long life, with fewer circumstances of affliction than are the lot of most men. Uninterrupted health, a competence for every reasonable want, usefulness to my fellow-citizens, a good portion of their esteem, no complaint against the world which has sufficiently honored me, and above all, a family which has blessed me by their affections, and never by their conduct given me a moment's pain. ~ Thomas Jefferson

from what Purse are we building these Churches, Walter?
From the Imposicion on Coles.
And are the Coles not the blackest Element, which with their Smoak hide the Sunne?
Certainly they feed the Fires of this City, says he.
And where is the Light and Easinesse there? Since we take our Revenues from the Under-world, what does it Signifie if we also Build upon the Dead? ~ Peter Ackroyd

The human race is homesick for Eden, which only two humans have ever known. We spend our lives chasing peaceful delight, following dead ends or cul-de-sacs in pursuit of home. We know intuitively that we've wandered. What we don't know is how to return. Our lives are largely the story of the often wrong and occasionally right turns we take in our attempts to get home to Happiness with a capital H - God himself. ~ Randy Alcorn

But if we begin thinking about the world being over 100 million years old, then it's absolutely by chance that you and I are sitting here alive today, while all the others are dead or have never been born. ~ Thor Heyerdahl

Under no circumstances are you to butter your entire roll and, my God!" she cried suddenly, switching Lan's hand three times in rapid succession. "Never lick your knife!" "Ouch! Fine! Buggering fuck! Leave off with that beshitted thing!" The dead woman let out a sound like the chirping of a bird, staring at her with an indignation that was nearly horror. "Ladies," she sputtered at last. "Ladies do not say bugger or fuck!" "But beshitted's all right?" Lan asked cautiously. "No, it is not!" "You know, I may not be as mannered-up as you are, but in Norwood, it's rude to yell at the table. ~ R. Lee Smith

It is easy in a moment like this to want to speak over this woman, to tell Tía there is nothing more we can do, to say out loud the woman is lucky that her lungs still draw breath. But I learned young, you do not speak of the dying as if they are already dead. You do not call bad spirits into the room, & you do not smudge a person's dignity by pretending they are not still alive, & right in front of you, and perhaps about to receive a miracle. You do not let your words stunt unknown possibilities. ~ Elizabeth Acevedo