Dead City Quotes

Zues?" I said.
"His computer. He named it." Then she whispered conspiratorially, "He acts like it's a person."
"I do not," he said as we walked down the hall toward his room.
"You gave it a birthday party," she said.
Grayson stopped walking for a moment. "Annual hard-drive maintenance and software upgrades do not count as a birthday party."
"No," she said. "But singing 'Happy Birthday' to it does."
He took a deep breath. They've obviously been through this before. "You know I was testing the new voice-recognition software."
Natalie looked at me. "Birthday party. ~ James Ponti

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night's rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue - if the latter does not itself cease - fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramifications and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations. ~ Marcel Proust

The snow filled the air with a soft grey-blue mist, softening the wind and gunfire, bringing the earth and sky together into one swaying blur.
The snow fell on Bach's shoulders; it was as though flakes of silence were falling on the still Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow. Everything was disappearing beneath it: guns, the bodies of the dead, filthy dressings, rubble, scraps of twisted iron.
This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future. ~ Vasily Grossman

My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead. ~ Tayari Jones

I thought you were dead," she went on. "I saw you fall down, and - I thought you were dead. ~ Cassandra Clare

An evening up on the Empire State roof-the strangest experience. The huge tomb in steel and glass, the ride to the 84th floor and there, under the clouds, a Hawaiian string quartet, lounge, concessions and, a thousand feet below, New York-a garden of golden lights winking on and off, automobiles, trucks winding in and out, and not a sound. All as silent as a dead city-and it looks adagio down there. ~ Dawn Powell

We will not die cornered and cowering in the ruins of a dead city. ~ Rachel L. Schade

I stood at the end of the street, catching snow in my mouth, and laughed softly to myself as I realized that without my insomnia and anxiety and pain I'd never have been awake to see the city that never sleeps asleep and blanketed up for winter. I smiled and felt silly, but in the best possible way. ~ Jenny Lawson

It's always difficult when people compare me unfavorably with other contemporary writers. It's much easier when they use examples from earlier eras of fiction. Because then I can say, Well, I may not be talented, but at least I'm not DEAD. ~ Tad Williams

After watching Walking Dead for nine years and watching how people are behaving during this pandemic I have come to the conclusion that Walking Dead is not fiction. ~ Don Rittner

By then she was dead. In fact, she may have been dead a while ago. Physically, several seconds ago, mentally, ages ago. ~ Koushun Takami

Excerpted From Chapter One
I decided staying put in the alley was preferable to keeping the dead guy company, so I went outside and lit a Lucky Strike. The night air had gotten damper and chillier during the short time I was in the warehouse, or maybe it was just me.
Wisps of lacy fog were now sinking into the alley, and a skulking cat in search of dinner moved slowly along the opposite wall until he noticed me. He scurried off in a furry blur, eager to be far away from the evil invading his domain. The cat had better sense than me and I wished I could follow his example. ~ H.P. Oliver

Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan. ~ H.L. Mencken

Now pull back briefly from the dripping streets of Ankh-Morpork, pan across the morning mists of the Disc, and focus in again on a young man heading for the city with all the openness, sincerity, and innocence of purpose of an iceberg drifting into a major shipping lane. ~ Terry Pratchett

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book. ~ Ellen Glasgow

It may perhaps be said that it signifies nothing to a man what is done to him after he is dead; but it signifies much to the living; it either tortures their feelings or hardens their hearts ... ~ Thomas Paine

The Country Music Awards were held Wednesday night at Universal City. The best country songs are always about drinking and guns and love gone wrong. Next year they're giving Robert Blake the Lifetime Achievement Award. ~ Argus Hamilton

Sometimes I have to act crazy to handle the crazies. Trying to be normal near the crazies makes me as crazy as them. The more I push reason and logic on them, the more they pervert it and use it against me, the angrier they make me feel. It's much easier to pretend they're ghosts talking to the wind, and ignore them as if they weren't really human. My mood improves, my self-esteem is better and I feel happier. On another hand, maybe I'm just being realistic here, because you can't really talk to the dead. That's what people without respect or empathy are; dead in the brain; just walking bodies without a soul. ~ Robin Sacredfire

My ideal man is dead white old and on a green sheet of paper. ~ Nicki Minaj

I think it's just getting comfortable in New York City, comfortable in your own skin. ~ Alex Rodriguez

Never resign. There's always a chance your opponent may drop dead before he mates you. ~ Israel Albert Horowitz

In the girl's room on the chest of drawers stood the glass vase with the withered flowers, the water had evaporated, it was there that her blind hands directed themselves, her fingers brushed against the dead petals, how fragile life is when it is abandoned. ~ Jose Saramago

Don't bury me but instead use me as fertilizer to grow a tree..I can prove to you im useful both alive and dead ~ Me

Chick-fil-A is not welcome in New York City as long as the company's president continues to uphold and promote his discriminatory views. ~ Christine Quinn

Not enough youths fighting windmills. And the old are fearful, jaded or dead. Do not ask me what to do. I am just as cowardly as you. And do not tell me it is enough to speak the truth; that it is bravery enough. Every mountain leveled to the ground, every forest burned, every man, woman, and child who lost their shanties to arsonist fires were defended to the heavens - with words. ~ Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

If I could live in one city and do every single thing I do there, I would choose Venice. You can't turn your head without seeing something amazing. ~ Nile Rodgers

In a city like San Francisco, you can throw a rock out your front door and hit someone with a nice ass and pretty brown eyes. But to find someone you want to fall asleep with, someone you want to breathe and dream next to, is terribly rare. ~ Christopher Baer Will

Even though I didn't write 'Shaun Of The Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz,' I never felt left out of the creative process. ~ Nick Frost

Rain falling on water ... Ah, yes ... When he was a little lad he'd pretended that the raindrops splashing in the running gutters were soldiers. Millions of soldiers. And the bubbles that sometimes went floating by were men on horseback. Right now he couldn't remember what the occasional dead dog had been. Some kind of siege weapon, possibly. ~ Terry Pratchett

Bill tried to stand. Bill tried to get back on his feet. Bill knew you had to stand. You had to get back on your feet. Bill knew if you did not stand. If you did not get back on your feet. Then you were finished. You were dead. And the people who supported you. The people who believed in you. They were finished, too. They were dead, too. And so Bill knew you had to stand. You had to get back on your feet. For the people, for the people. You always had to stand. You always had to get back on your feet. And Bill stood. ~ David Peace

I'm coming back, Nahri," he promised. "You're my Banu Nahida. This is my city." His expression was defiant. "Nothing will keep me from either of you. ~ S.A. Chakraborty

He'd kill you all right. No sweat. But for the wrong reasons. Amateur's reasons. Of course, you'll be just as dead. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

It is with great regret that I have to inform Manchester City of my wish to leave the club. ~ Carlos Tevez

All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly ... Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time board-rooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life. ~ J.G. Ballard

I was having trouble with the scale of things. A man killed with a musket was just as dead as one killed with a mortar. It was just that the mortar killed impersonally, destroying dozens of men, while the musket was fired by one man who could see the eyes of the one he killed. That made it murder, it seemed to me, not war. How many men to make a war? Enough, perhaps, so they didn't really have to see each other? ~ Diana Gabaldon

Theo's already on his way. Paul might bee too, but communications have been down so long, I don't know."
"Heading out here with a storm like this coming in? That's madness." Dad sighs. "Then again, jumping through dimensions to chase a dead man is madness too. I had long suspected their lunacy but this confirmation is nonetheless disquieting."
"See? Everything's going to be fine. ~ Claudia Gray

The Peace Panda Says: Without The Heartfelt Prayer Of Love And Compassion ... Even The Greatest Of Temples, Mosques, Synagogues and Cathedrals Of Humanity Are Spiritually Dead. What is Humanity Without It's Spirit? ~ Timothy Pina

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness - a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self, which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair - then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you'd hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on adorable, even though you'd been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one - well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least. ~ David Rakoff

I wish I was dead, or that it were tomorrow night," groaned Phil.
"If you live long enough both wishes will come true," said Anne calmly. ~ L.M. Montgomery

Then coffin, black with silver handles with the dead boy in a black velvet suit. If you're never gonna sweat why not go out in winter style? ~ Marlon James

It always confused me how Smalley managed to keep enrolment limited only to Guardian bloodlines. I don't know, maybe she put some charm up that made people think about dead puppies every time they stepped on campus. That's what I would have done, anyway, if I were headmistress. ~ Cecily White

When photography was invented, people had to make room in their minds for the idea that the dead would always be visible. ~ Vicki Goldberg

Haven't I heard of men more dried up than he is, being brought all the way from Egypt in cases covered with pictures?" "You idiot! - those were mummies; they had been dead for ages. ~ Jules Verne

The next person that shows my girlfriend a picture of me wearing one of Mom's bras is a dead man! ~ R.L. Mathewson

Most people my age are dead at the present time and you can look it up. ~ Casey Stengel

From dead plant matter to nematodes to bacteria, never underestimate the cleverness of mushrooms to find new food! ~ Paul Stamets

I'm a reporter," Rachel said. "I write about the arts, festivals, new projects in the city. What I'm not is some kind of psychic astral traveler! How did I get here? Planning a trip to another dimension? ~ G.G. Collins

In spite of the incident, my experience in Kansas City was wonderful and I thank all the warm and supportive people, including so many veterans, who came to welcome me last night. ~ Jane Fonda

I will not be quoting Hemingway anytime soon, nor will I ever read another one of his books.
And if he were still alive, I would write him a letter right now and threaten to strangle him dead with my bare hands just for being so glum.
No wonder he put a gun to his head, like it says in the introductory essay. ~ Matthew Quick