Dead Authors Quotes

Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news. ~ David Markson

Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable. ~ Jane Smiley

You don't read books by living people?" "Living authors don't have any merit." "Why's that?" "Dead authors, as a rule, seem more trusting than live ones. ~ Anonymous

Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money. ~ Thomas C. Foster

No amount of therapy can replace the joy of revenge writing. ~ Mylo Carbia

Nothing is so good for the morale of the troops as occasionally to see a dead general. ~ William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim

As with life, so with words. ~ Sid Gustafson

It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to still believe in Santa Claus - but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year Some people can accept this, and some can't. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead. ~ Daniel Barenboim

All hurt is a consequence of focusing on what's dead. ~ Dr. Jacent Mpalyenkana, Ph.D. MBA

But if the world measures a refugee according to the worst story, we will always excuse human suffering, saying it is not yet as bad as someone else's. ~ Victoria Armour-Hileman

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,
that soft summer morning
round a turning in the path,
the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,
its legs in the air like a woman in need
burning its wedding poisons
like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,
I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,
but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.
I am the vampire of my own heart,
one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter
who can no longer smile.
Am I dead?
I must be dead. ~ Charles Baudelaire

The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Cricket was a manly game. Manly masters spoke of the 'discipline of the hard ball'. Schools preferred manly games. Games were only manly if it was possible while playing them to be killed or drowned or at the very least badly maimed. Cricket could be splendidly dangerous. Tennis was not manly, and if a boy had asked permission to spend the afternoon playing croquet he would have been instantly punished for his 'general attitude'. Athletics were admitted into the charmed lethal circle as a boy could, with a little ingenuity, get impaled during the pole-vault or be decapitated by a discus and did a manly death. Fives were thought to be rather tame until one boy ran his head into a stone buttress and got concussion and another fainted dead away from heat and fatigue. Then everybody cheered up about fives. ~ Arthur Marshall

To Beatrice-
darling, dearest, dead. ~ Lemony Snicket

My friend, be not like him who sits by his fireside and watches the fire go out, then blows vainly upon the dead ashes. Do not give up hope or yield to despair because of that which is past, for to bewail the irretrievable is the worst of human frailties. ~ Khalil Gibran

Zhuangzi's wife died. When Huizu went to convey his condolences, he found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. "You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old," said Huizu. "It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing - this is going too far, isn't it?"

Zhuangzi said, "You're wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn't grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there's been another change and she's dead. It's just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.

"Now she's going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate. So I stopped. ~ Zhuangzi

Fire!
Your nose ignites,
flameless kerosene
(and, some say, Drano)
laced with ephedrine
you want to cry
powdered demons bite
through cartilage and sinuses,
take dead aim at your
brain, jump inside
want to scream
troops of tapping feet
fall into rhythm,
marking time, right
between your eyes
get the urge to dance
louder, louder, ultra
gray-matter power,
shock waves of energy
mushroom inside your head
you want to let go
detonate,
annihilate barriers,
bring down the walls,
unleashing floodwaters,
freeing long-captive dreams
to ride the current
through
arteries and capillaries,
pulsing, rushing,
raging torrents
pounding against your heart
sweeping you away ~ Ellen Hopkins

Come hell or high water, I will separate you from your man-business. I don't care how, or if you kill me. If it means me, dead, holding your junk, I'll take your junk. Got that? ~ Nicole Peeler

They are the kind of people who are embarrassed by money, a dead middle-class giveaway. Poor people are not embarrassed by money and are contemptuous of those who are. ~ Rosellen Brown

There are no medicines to bring a dead thing back to life. ~ Kristin Cashore

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love." from "Memoriam ~ Anne Michaels

You know the only thing worse than being dead? Being dead and having to watch crappy TV because you I can't change the channel. ~ Sherry D. Ficklin

There are things that can break you, he'd said. I almost laughed. He had no idea the thing that had broken me most completely was my belief that Barrons was dead.
One look at Lor's eyes and I decided I would wait until Barrons was back before pressing any issues with him. "You think Barrons has a weakness for me," I said. "That's what worries you."
"It is forbidden."
"He despises me. He thinks I slept with Darroc, remember?"
"He cares that you slept with Darroc."
"He cared that I burned his rug, too. He gets a little pissy about those things he likes to think of as his property."
"You two drive me bug-fuck. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Embrace your inner goddess, never let go of the light you carry within. ~ Cynthia Dougherty-Bernal

Westwards along the basement, I let myself through a heavy door just beyond the dead giraffes. There was a notice on the wall that read "Departmental cock"
I never did find out what that meant. ~ Richard Fortey

When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical. ~ William Shakespeare

R.I.P. A careless abbreviation of "requiescat in pace", attesting to indolent goodwill to the dead. According to the learned Dr. Drigge, however, the letters originally meant nothing more than "reductus in pulvis". ~ Ambrose Bierce

Absence has presence, sometimes, and that was what she felt. Absence like crushed-dead grass were something has been and is no longer. Absence where a thread has been ripped, ragged, from a tapestry, leaving a gap that can never be mended. ~ Laini Taylor

If I were an athlete I'd be past my prime. If I were a dog I'd be dead. Thirty ... shit. ~ Jonathan Tropper

There's some that came here never believing they were dead. They insisted all the way that they were alive, it was a mistake, someone would have to pay; made no difference. There's others who longed to be dead when they were alive, poor souls; lives full of pain or misery; killed themselves for a chance of a blessed rest, and found that nothing had changed except for the worse, and this time there was no escape; you can't make yourself alive again. ~ Philip Pullman

On both sides in 1915 there would be more dead on any single day than yards gained in the entire year. And there would be nearly four more years of attrition - not to determine who was right, but who was left. ~ Stanley Weintraub

I take Democrats to bed with me for lack of a dachshund, although as a matter of fact on occasions like this I am almost certain to be visited by the ghost of Fred, my dash-hound everlasting, dead these many years. In life, Fred always attended the sick, climbing right into bed with the patient like some lecherous old physician, and making a bad situation worse. ~ E.B. White

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. ~ John Updike

We're all dead the moment we're born. Just, some of us get there faster than others. ~ Alex Scarrow

We have a sacred responsibility to fulfill the threefold mission of the Church - first, to teach the gospel to the world; second, to strengthen the membership of the Church wherever they may be; third, to move forward the work of salvation for the dead. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I And hailed the earth with such a cry As is not heard save from a man Who has been dead, and lives again. About the trees my arms I wound; Like one gone mad I hugged the ground; I raised my quivering arms on high; I laughed and laughed into the sky ... ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

I think the whole concept that women aren't funny is dead. It's over; it's done. ~ Kate Flannery

She read beautifully, deeply. I don't know how else to describe it.
Eventually, I finally asked her what she got out of reading these books by old dead men, what the words on the page had to do with her. The kind of question an idiot asks. But she took it seriously, she pursed her lips.
It's just another way to talk to the dead, she said.
It's another way to make a way, she said. ~ Bryan Washington

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

- so much more opportunity now." Her voice trails off.

"Hurrah for women's lib, eh?"

"The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed."

The apocalyptic word jars my attention.

"What do you mean, doomed?"

She glances at me as if I weren't hanging straight either and says vaguely, "Oh …"

"Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?"

Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different.

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like - like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons.

"Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch."

No answering smile.

"That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a - a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chink ~ James Tiptree Jr.

Now, go knock 'em dead."
I assume he means that I should make a good impression at the party, and not to follow the literal interpretation of that expression. ~ Bree Despain

Nine-tenths of the world is entertained by scandalous rumors, which are never dissected until they are dead and, when pricked, collapse like an empty bladder. ~ Horace Greeley

This is earth again, the earth where I've lived and now will live once more ... I've been to eternity and back. I know how the dead would feel to live again. ~ Charles Lindbergh