C Is For Corpse Quotes

About every six to eight months, I run into a man who astounds me sexually, but between escapades, I'm celibate, which I don't think is any big deal. After two unsuccessful marriages, I find myself keeping my guard up, along with my underpants. ~ Sue Grafton

Well if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner."
"Aspargus is in season," said Francis helpfully. ~ Donna Tartt

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of
thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most vicious sadist. ~ Primo Levi

They say, the sun brings life to the world. The sun will rise and look is it not a corpse? Everything is dead and there are corpses everywhere. Just people and around them silence__that is the world! "Love one another"__who said that? Whose command is that? The pendulum swings unfeelingly, antagonistically. It's two o'clock at night. Her slippers are standing by her bed, as if waiting for her ... No, seriously, when they take her away tomorrow, what shall I do? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Maybe we too are living like dead people. We move about life in our own corpse because we are not touching life in depth. We live a kind of artificial life, with lots of plans, lots of worries and anger. Never are we able to establish ourselves in the here and now and live our lives deeply. We have to wake up! We have to make it possible for the moment of awareness to manifest. This is the practice that will save us - this is the revolution. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Unless the Holy Ghost blesses the Word, we who preach the gospel are of all men most miserable, for we have attempted a task that is impossible. We have entered on a sphere where nothing but the supernatural will ever avail. If the Holy Spirit does not renew the hearts of our hearers, we cannot do it. If the Holy Ghost does not regenerate them, we cannot. If He does not send the truth home into their souls, we might as well speak into the ear of a corpse. ~ Steven J. Lawson

When the logs in the fireplace crackle merrily, the corpse of a beech or oak is going up in flames. The paper in the book you are holding in your hands right now is made from the shavings of spruce, and birches were expressly felled (that is to say, killed) for this purpose. Does that sound over the top? I don't think so. For if we keep in mind all we have learned in the previous chapters, parallels can definitely be drawn to pigs and pork. Not to put too fine a point on it, we use living things killed for our purposes. Does that make our behavior reprehensible? Not necessarily. After all, we are also part of Nature, and we are made in such a way that we can survive only with the help of organic substances from other species. We share this necessity with all other animals. The real question is whether we help ourselves only to what we need from the forest ecosystem, and-analogous to our treatment of animals-whether we spare the trees unnecessary suffering when we do this.

That means it is okay to use wood as long as trees are allowed to live in a way that is appropriate to their species. And that means that they should be allowed to fulfill their social needs, to grow in a true forest environment on undisturbed ground, and to pass their knowledge on to the next generation. And at least some of them should be allowed to grow old with dignity and finally die a natural death. ~ Peter Wohlleben

I look down at myself, but I don't need to. I can feel it. My hot blood is pounding through my body, flooding capillaries and lighting up cells like Fourth of July fireworks. I can feel the elation of every atom in my flesh, brimming with gratitude for the second chance they never expected to get. The chance to start over, to live right, to love right, to burn up in a fiery cloud and never again be buried in the mud. I kiss Julie to hide the fact that I'm blushing. My face is bright red and hot enough to melt steel.

Okay, corpse, a voice in my head says, and I feel a twitch in my belly, more like a gentle nudge than a kick. I'm going now. I'm sorry I couldn't be here for your battle; I was fighting my own. But we won, right? I can feel it. There's a shiver in our legs, a tremor like the Earth speeding up, spinning off into uncharted orbits. Scary, isn't it? But what wonderful thing didn't start out scary? I don't know what the next page is for you, but whatever it is for me I swear I'm not going to fuck it up. I'm not going to yawn off in the middle of a sentence and hide it in a drawer. Not this time. Peel off these dusty wool blankets of apathy and antipathy and cynical desiccation. I want life in all its stupid sticky rawness.

Okay.

Okay, R.

Here it comes. ~ Isaac Marion

Start with a girl whose blood has been steeped in Korea for generations, imprinted with Confucianism and shamanism and war. Extract her from the mountains. Plant her in wheat fields between the Red River and the Mississippi. Baptize her. Indoctrinate her. Tell her who she is. Tell her what is real.
See what happens.
Witness a love affair with freaks, a fascination with hermaphrodites and conjoined twins, a fixation on Pisces and pairs of opposites. Trace a dream that won't die: a vision of an old woman slumped on a bench, her spirit sitting straight out of the body, joined to the corpse at the waist. ~ Jane Jeong Trenka

Jesus Christ is not a cosmic errand boy. I mean no disrespect or irreverence in so saying, but I do intend to convey the idea that while he loves us deeply and dearly, Christ the Lord is not perched on the edge of heaven, anxiously anticipating our next wish. When we speak of God being good to us, we generally mean that he is kind to us. In the words of the inimitable C. S. Lewis, "What would really satisfy us would be a god who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven--a senile benevolence who as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.'" You know and I know that our Lord is much, much more than that.

One writer observed: "When we so emphasize Christ's benefits that he becomes nothing more than what his significance is 'for me' we are in danger. . . . Evangelism that says 'come on, it's good for you'; discipleship that concentrates on the benefits package; sermons that 'use' Jesus as the means to a better life or marriage or job or attitude--these all turn Jesus into an expression of that nice god who always meets my spiritual needs. And this is why I am increasingly hesitant to speak of Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. As Ken Woodward put it in a 1994 essay, 'Now I think we all need to be ~ Robert L. Millet

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) ~ W. H. Auden

*Live fast, die young, and, leave a good looking corpse.* is dumb. When dead, looks matters not. (Furthermore, the corpse will only look good for a day, or, twelve.) ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

One of the few times I'm hit emotionally is when I listen to the tapes sadists make of torturing their victims. There the person is currently suffering, you can hear them suffer, and that calls out for an empathic response. But when they're dead, when they're no longer suffering, when it's over, it's hard to feel empathetic for the corpse. ~ Park Dietz

Between the sleeping and the waking, it is there.

Between the rising and the resting, it is there.

It is always there.

It gnaws on my heart. It chews on my soul.

I turn aside and see it. I stop my ears and hear it. I cover myself and feel it.

There are no human words for what I mean.

It is the language of the bare bough and the cold stone, pronounced in the fell wind's sullen whisper and the metronomic drip-drip of the rain. It is the song the falling snow sings and the discordant clamour of sunlight ripped apart by the canopy and miserly filtered down.

It is what the unseeing eye sees. It is what the deaf ear heres.

It is the romantic ballad of death's embrace; the solemn hymn of offal dripping from bloody teeth; the lamentation of the bloated corpse rotting in the sun; the graceful ballet of maggots twisting in the ruins of God's temple.

Here in this gray land, we have no name. We are the carcasses reflected in the yellow eye.

Our bones are bleached within our skin; our empty sockets regard the crow.

Here in this shadow country, our tiny voices scratch like a fly's wing against unmoving air.

Ours is the language of imbeciles, the gibberish of idiots. The root and the vine have more to say than us. ~ Rick Yancey

I like the term "decedent." It's as though the man weren't dead, but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute. For evident reasons, mortuary science is awash with euphemisms. "Don't say stiff, corpse, cadaver," scolds The Principles and Practice of Embalming. "Say decedent, remains or Mr. Blank. Don't say 'keep.' Say 'maintain preservation.' ... "Wrinkles are "acquired facial markings." Decomposed brain that filters down through a damaged skull and bubbles out the nose is "frothy purge. ~ Mary Roach

Success is for a man whose stories of sruggles and chalenges are inspirations to and up coming generation.. ~ Nelly Sanaba .c.

I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse ...
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough. ~ Henry Miller

C is for Cash Only. I don't take cards. Where would I put the swipe machine? ~ Belle De Jour

Life is not for understanding, it is for living ~ Richard C. Pizey

Professor A. H. Maslow, for example, has conducted a series of researches into extremely healthy people that have led him to conclude that health and optimism are far more positive principles in human psychology than Freud would ever have admitted.

Man is a slave to the delusion that he is a passive creature, a creature of circumstance; this is because he makes the mistake of identifying himself with his limited everyday consciousness, and is unaware of the immense forces that lie just beyond the threshold of consciousness. But these forces, although he is unaware of them on a conscious level, are still a far more active influence in his life than any external circumstances. Freudian psychology, for all its achievements, has made a twofold error: it has tried to anatomize the human mind as a pathologist would dissect a corpse, and it has limited its researches to sick human beings. Sick men talk about their illness far more than healthy people talk about their health; in fact, healthy people are usually too absorbed in living to bother with self-revelation. Psychology has consequently been inclined to divide the world into sick people and "normal" people, regarding occasional super-normality as the exception; Maslow has shown that super-normality is a great deal commoner than would be supposed; in fact as common as sub-normality. Ordinarily healthy people often experience a sense of intense life-affirmation (which Maslow calls "peak experiences"); and examination o ~ Colin Wilson

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is-like a corpse-buried.
How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted."
New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land-do not hope-
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.2 ~ Constantine P. Cavafy

Crisis is the third of the five-part form. It means decision. Characters make spontaneous decisions each time they open their mouths to say "this" not "that." In each scene they make a decision to take one action rather than another. But Crisis with a capital C is the ultimate decision. The Chinese ideogram for Crisis is two terms: Danger/Opportunity - "danger" in that the wrong decision at this moment will lose forever what we want; "opportunity" in that the right choice will achieve our desire. ~ Robert McKee

You entered,
Abrupt like "Take it!",
Mauling suede gloves, you tarried,
And said:
"You know,-
I'm soon getting married."

Get married then.
It's all right,
I can handle it.
You see - I'm calm, of course!
Like the pulse
Of a corpse.

Remember?
You used to say:
"Jack London,
Money,
Love and ardour,"--
I saw one thing only:
You were La Gioconda,
Which had to be stolen!

And someone stole you.

Again in love, I shall start gambling,
With fire illuminating the arch of my eyebrows.
And why not?
Sometimes, the homeless ramblers
Will seek to find shelter in a burnt down house!

You're mocking me?
"You've fewer emeralds of madness
than a beggar kopecks, there's no disproving this!"
But remember
Pompeii came to end thus
When somebody teased Vesuvius!

Hey!
Gentlemen!
You care for
Sacrilege,
Crime
And war.
But have you seen
The frightening terror
Of my face
When
It's
Perfectly calm?

And I feel-
"I"
Is too small to fit me.
Someone inside me is getting smothered. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Battle is for an army to win or lose; war is for civilization to win or lose. ~ Ian C. Esslemont

Perhaps the most difficult task for us to perform is to rely on God's grace and God's grace alone for our celebration. It is difficult for our pride to rest on grace. Grace is for other people - for beggars. We don't want to live by a heavenly welfare system. We want to earn our own way and atone for our own sins. We like to think that we will go to heaven because we deserve to be there. ~ R.C. Sproul

It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it. ~ John C. Bogle

B is for boat, pushing off into the dark. C is the way that we find and we look. D is for diamonds, the bait on the hook. ~ Neil Gaiman

What remains of the dead? What remains of every one of us?

Tombstones sink in, moss covers them, and after a few centuries the name can no longer be read. Every forgotten grave is designated a new corpse.

As the generations passed, remembrance of the dead diminished until it was forgotten. What was called everlasting peace only lasted half a century. The bones were disturbed as the graveyards were mulched in to suburbs.

The earth had become too small, for the living and the dead. In half a century a funeral had become a luxury that only few could afford who had died before judgment day. But who cares about a single body when the whole planet is dying.

[...]

Earlier the remains of humanity had only had the right to be there as long as the living remembered them. A human being remembers their relatives, their friends and colleagues. But his conscience only reached back three generations before it faded away. Just more then fifty years.

With the same ease, you let the picture of our grandfather or your friend from school out of our conscience into absolute nothingness. The memories of a human can last longer than the bones, but as soon as the last one who remembered us has passed we dissolve with time.

[...]

Back then there was almost no more space in the thick family album for old and brown turned pictures, but almost nobody that looked through it could say for sure who was on the photos. ~ Dmitry Glukhovsky

A simple love-story,' said David piously, 'about a girl that loves a man frightfully and he is married, so she goes and lives with him, and then his wife is very ill and going to die, so the girl and the man both offer themselves for blood transfusion in a very noble way without each other knowing. But only one of them has the right kind of blood and I can't decide which. Do you think it would be more pathetic if the girl gave her blood and died, and then the man went off into the desert to be a monk, or if the man died and the wife and the girl made friends over his corpse and both became nuns? One might do good business with that, because in films no one much cares if the hero lives or dies so long as there are plenty of lovely heroines.' 'How ~ Angela Thirkell

Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold. One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alik ~ Henry Miller

Keeping score is for games, not friendships. ~ John C. Maxwell

Another woman catches sight of Fischerle's hump on the ground and runs screaming into the street: 'Murder! Murder!' She takes the hump for a corpse. Further details - she knows none. The murderer is very thin, a poor sap, how he came to do it, you shouldn't have thought it of him. Shot may be, someone suggests. Of course, everyone heard the shot. Three streets off, the shot had been heard. Not a bit of it, that was a motor tyre. No, it was a shot! The crowd won't be done out of its shot. A threatening attitude is assumed towards the doubters. Don't let him go. An accessory. Trying to confuse the trail! Out of the building comes more news. The woman's statements are revised. The thin man has been murdered. And the corpse on the floor? It's alive. It's the murderer, he had hidden himself. He was tring to creep away between the corpse's legs when he was caught. The more recent information is more detailed. The little man is a dwarf. What do you expect, a cripple! The blow was actually struck by another. A redheaded man. Ah, those redheads. The dwarf put him up to it. Lynch him! The woman gave the alarm. Cheers for the woman! She screamed and screamed. A Woman! Doesn't know what fear is. The murderer had threatened her. The redhead. It's always the Reds. He tore her collar off. No shooting. Of course not. What did he say? Someone must have invented the shot. The dwarf. Where is he? Inside. Rush the doors! No one else can get in. It's full up. What a murder! The woman had a platef ~ Elias Canetti

SNAPDRAGON 1. The dragon consists of half a pint of ignited brandy or alcohol in a dish. As soon as brandy is aflame, all lights are extinguished, and salt is freely sprinkled in dish, imparting a corpse-like pallor to every face. Candied fruits, figs, raisins, sugared almonds, etc., are thrown in, and guests snap for them with their fingers; person securing most prizes from flames will meet his true love within the year. ~ Mary E. Blain

In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead
dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

One day
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the
eyes of cows.

Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

The first thing I do when I come home is check the refrigerator for cats because I'm convinced that if one dies, my husband will hide it in there because I don't cook and so I won't see it. I do drink Cokes, though, so technically he should hide the corpse in the oven. And now I need to start checking the oven. ~ Jenny Lawson

This book is for the mothers who've had to say goodbye too soon. I see you, I hear you, and I honor your hearts with wings. You are the strongest individuals alive, and I'm blown away by your strength, your ability to love, and your ability to not quit on life. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

For instance, in one play the palace of Lord Hosokawa, in which was preserved the celebrated painting of Dharuma by Sesson, suddenly takes fire through the negligence of the samurai in charge. Resolved at all hazards to rescue the precious painting, he rushes into the burning building and seizes the kakemono, only to find all means of exit cut off by the flames. Thinking only of the picture, he slashes open his body with his sword, wraps his torn sleeve about the Sesson and plunges it into the gaping wound. The fire is at last extinguished. Among the smoking embers is found a half- consumed corpse, within which reposes the treasure uninjured by the fire. Horrible as such tales are, they illustrate the great value that we set upon a masterpiece, as well as the devotion of a trusted samurai. ~ Okakura Kakuzo

The city itself was dead. Some buildings had chunks missing. Bricks and concrete were scattered along sidewalks, debris mingling with bodies. Once this had been a thriving metropolis with a heartbeat all its own. Now it was a corpse, with no morgue big enough to house it. Nothing can ever prepare you for the eeriness of a great city emptied of humanity. In that small room in each of our souls where loneliness makes its home, our fear that we will end up alone and unloved is amplified a million times. ~ Bobby Underwood

Bagpipe Music'

It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with overproduction'.

It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caugh ~ Louis MacNeice