Dead Isle Quotes

The backfire, my dear boy, of exiling the cleverest criminals of the nation to one place and requiring them to use their ingenuity is that they will
and you can't control what they do with it. ~ Sam Starbuck

Trains are beautiful. They take people to places they've never been, faster than they could ever go themselves. Everyone who works on trains knows they have personalities, they're like people. They have their own mysteries. ~ Sam Starbuck

Husband and I are preparing ourselves for the new Doctor by watching - well, mainly rewatching - Mr. Capaldi's back catalogue, we've just finished The Crow Road in which he is utterly drop-dead gorgeous and actually I'd better stop there as husband is probably reading this so just let me point out that of course I'm only excited about upcoming Doctor Who because of the stories and it's definitely not because I fancy the new Doctor. ~ Jacqueline Rayner

[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string. ~ H.G.Wells

The dead reaching for us, needing us, but this isn't true. There's only us reaching for them, trying to find ourselves. ~ David Vann

I'm sick of being sick, but I would be sicker of being dead. ~ Ben Tolosa

Eden, Eden, I was dead without you. Oh God, I've been walking around like a ghost - half in this world, and half in the other. Eden . . ." I moaned out the words, ~ Mia Sheridan

I preferred to hang out with the dead, dying, or desperate books - used we call them, in a way that we'd never call a person, unless we meant it cruelly ~ David Levithan

I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal. ~ Chloe Thurlow

There's a fine line between terrorists and revolutionaries, and on both sides of that line they want Kem and every slinger like him dead and to see Sling City and the arena themselves drifting aimlessly in scorched pieces through space. They see the games as a global distraction from the wars that have been raging for close to a decade now. The wrong side is winning, as it often does. The corporations and governments are lying to the people, as they often do. Kem never involved or invested himself in politics. Since the age of thirteen he's cared about three things: his team, winning, and being the best. You can call it selfish, or you can call it a reduced worldview. The ~ Matt Wallace

Her foot rammed into a mossy log, knocking her off balance. Even in the fading light she could see that there was nothing up ahead but more forest. She looked at the ground. The path had disappeared.
"There's no road left," she said, panic in her voice. She whipped her head around to face Driggs. "So Dead End really is a dead end?"
He smirked at her. "What, you thought it was just a cute name?"
"Driggs," she said, trying to keep her tone steady, "show me the way to that cabin, or I swear to God I'll feed you to the first bear that inevitably shows up to eat us. ~ Gina Damico

A few Paris blocks away I led a completely normal life with my sister & grandparents. And here I was sword fighting with dead guys. ~ Amy Plum

The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight. ~ Plato

I also love the zombie genre, my zombie fandom going way back to 'Night of the Living Dead.' And 'The Walking Dead' is truly the ultimate representation of that sensibility in the comic book genre. ~ Gale Anne Hurd

We are all Dead, just not yet buried. ~ Brandon Notch

As a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation. ~ Lynn Coady

The Lost Tribe

How long, how long must I regret?
I never found my people yet;
I go about, but cannot find
The blood-relations of the mind

Through my little sphere I range,
And though I wither do not change;
Must not change a jot, lest they
Should not know me on my way.

Sometimes I think when I am dead
They will come about my bed,
For my people well do know
When to come and when to go.

I know not why I am alone,
Nor where my wandering tribe is gone,
But be they few, or be they far,
Would I were where my people are! ~ Ruth Pitter

Better a live coward than a dead hero, I've always believed. Sure people will still sing about dead heroes from time to time, but aside from that they get little attention. Unless they manage to get a holiday named after them. Even then, it's not like they get to enjoy the day off. ~ Bill Allen

Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful. ~ Samuel Beckett

I thought you were dead."
"Me too, baby, me too," he said weakly. ~ Leigh Fallon

My theory was that if you spent such a big portion of your life being a snob, you were not allowed to be surprised when people start wishing you dead. ~ Chrissy Moon

As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity. ~ Ernst Toller

All the living want to do is care for the dead. And now they, too, are among the fallen. ~ Joelle Charbonneau

The Mr. absent, and the house dead. ~ George Herbert

If you come back from the dead, you don't have the same value system, I think. ~ Sigourney Weaver

A hundred hands wanted shaking, a hundred tongues expressed their condolences. Thank you, said William, and Kind of you, endlessly.

Between his uncle and the helpfulness of the Misses Young and all these other people, William was never alone, not for an hour, except to sleep. He went to bed with the distant, certain expectation that overnight the world would put itself right. He slept for long hours: endless, dreamless sleep, which did not refresh, and when he woke the world bewildered him by persisting in its wayward course. He felt weighted down and dreary. A fog settled between him and his own thoughts, and behind it, unformulated, unexamined, was this: How long before things go back to normal?

His mother was dead: he had seen the body; yet this knowledge refused to find a settled place in his mind. It came and went, surprised him every time he chanced upon it, and there were a million reasons not to believe it. His mother was dead, but look: here were her clothes and here her tea cups, here her Sunday hat on the shelf over the coat hook. His mother was dead, but hark: the garden gate! Any moment now she would come through the door. ~ Diane Setterfield

I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it. ~ Cynthia Ozick

You're the last line of defense. When you're dead, Hitler will march through Leningrad the way he marched through Paris. Do you remember that?'
'That's not fair. The French didn't fight,' Tatiana said, wanting to be anywhere right now but standing in front of men loading artwork from the Hermitage onto armored trucks.
'They didn't fight, Tania, but you will fight. For every street and for every building. And when you lose
'
'The art will be saved.'
'Yes! The art will be saved,' Alexander said emotionally. 'And another artist will paint a glorious picture, immortalizing you, with a club in your raised hand, swinging to hit the German tank as it's about to crush you, all against the backdrop of the statue of Peter the Great atop his bronze horse. And that picture will hang in the Hermitage, and at the start of the next war the curator will once again stand on the street, crying over his vanishing crates. ~ Paullina Simons

The dead must humor the mourners, he thought, and the sick must comfort the visitors. It was always so. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

A man of genius is not a man who sees more than other men do. On the contrary, it is very often found that he is absentminded andobserves much less than other people ... Why is it that the public have such an exaggerated respect for him
after he is dead? The reason is that the man of genius understands the importance of the few things he sees. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Nation after nation, when at the zenith of its power, has proclaimed itself invincible because its army could shake the earth with its tread and its ships could fill the seas, but these nations are dead, and we must build upon a different foundation if we would avoid their fate. ~ William Jennings Bryan

There were new words for everything in their dead language put back to use. New words for the jets and their radar systems. New words for the tanks and the radios inside. But for this, for the hammer and beat of the forge, the Bible still sufficed. ~ Nathan Englander

There're three reasons
people get away from here:
gone good, gone bad or
gone dead. ~ Emma Cameron

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself. ~ Wally Lamb

The hardest thing for me in Vietnam wasn't seeing the wounded and dead. It was watching the big transport jets come in, bringing loads of fresh new boys for the war. ~ Johnny Cash

But he was not her Gabriel. Her Gabriel was dead. Gone. Leaving behind only vestiges of him in the body of a harsh and tortured clone. Gabriel had almost broken Julia's heart once. She was determined she would not let him break her heart for the second time. ~ Sylvain Reynard