Dead Man S Float Quotes

Christ rose so long ago but the air
he rose through hasn't forgotten
the slight red contrail from the wounds. ~ Jim Harrison

All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door. ~ C.S. Lewis

Hang the boy, can't I never learn anything? Ain't he played tricks on me enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can;t learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what's coming? He 'pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my dander up and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it's all down again and I can't hit him a lick. I ain't doing my duty by that boy, and that's the Lord's truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I'm a-laying up sin and suffering for the both of us, I know. He's full of the Old Scratch, but laws-a-me! he's my own dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart almost breaks. Well-a-well, man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, as the Scripture says, and I reckon it's so. He'll play hooky this evening, and I'll just be obleeged to make him work tomorrow, to punish him. It's mighty hard to make him work Saturdays, when all the boys is having holiday, but he hates work more than he hates anything else, and I've got to do some of my duty by him, or I'll be the ruination of the child. ~ Mark Twain

Why don't you just do it, then?" Racath hissed. "Just kill me. I dare you."

Now, I assume you know what this is. You've seen this before in other stories - the part where the disgruntled villain stands over the hero. He is triumphant, the hero now at his mercy. But when commanded to slay him, he hesitates. He lowers his sword. And he says: "I cannot."

If you are to take away but one thing from the words I have spoken, let it be this: there is a world of difference between "I Cannot" and "I will not".

"I cannot" is a surrender. It implies a lack of options. Someone who says such a thing does so only because they have no other choice. They do not WISH to relent - in fact, they usually want to obey their mandate and destroy the hero at their feet. But they cannot, because the guilt is too unbearable. But that does not make him a better man; all that a man who says "I cannot" has done, is given in to the compulsion to repent.

Allow me to make myself perfectly clear - I HAD other options. Easy options. Simple options. I could have killed Racath Thanjel that day. I could have killed him and all the others, too. I could have left them dead and bloody on that grassy hill, and gone trotting back to the Imperator's lap. I could have shrugged off the attrition that had dogged my every step, thought better of my disenssion, given up on all hope of absolution and accepted my damnation. And I could have spent the rest of eternity destroying God' ~ S.G. Night

The New Testament writers speak as if Christ's achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the 'first fruits,' the pioneer of life,' He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. ~ C.S. Lewis

And so to my fool's bed. What was that? No, no, not a girl crying in the garden. No one, cold, hungry, and banished, was shivering there, longing and not daring to come in. It was the chains swinging at the well. It would be folly to get up and go out and call again: Psyche, Psyche, my only love. I am a great queen. I have killed a man. I am drunk like a man. All warriors drink deep after the battle. Bardia's lips on my hand were like the touch of lightning. All great princes have mistresses and lovers. There's the crying again. No, it's only the buckets at the well. "Shut the window, Poobi. To your bed, child. Do you love me, Poobi? Kiss me good night. Good night." The king's dead. He'll never pull my hair again. A straight thrust and then a cut in the leg. That would have killed him. I am the Queen; I'll kill Orual too. ~ C.S. Lewis

I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mill so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you. ~ C.S. Lewis

It was probably indecent to think of a corpse as impotent. But he was, very likely. That would be why his wife had taken up with the prize-fighter Red Evans Williams of Castell Goch. ~ Ford Madox Ford

But Holden suspected there was a lot more to Prax than that. There was a relentless forward motion to the man. The universe might knock him down over and over again, but unless he was dead, he'd just keep getting up and shuffling ahead toward his goal. Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks. Plodding along until he got to where he needed to be. ~ James S.A. Corey

But for now, if
we have been right in how we investigated and what we said, virtue turns out to be
neither innate nor earned. It is something that comes to those who possess it as a free
gift from the gods – with understanding not included; unless, that is, you can point to
some statesmen who could make another man a statesman. If there were such a one, he
could be said to rank among the living as Homer said Teiresias ranked among the dead:
namely, 'he alone kept his wits collected while the others flitted about like shadows.'
In the same way such a man would, as far as virtue is concerned, stand forth as
someone of substance – opposed, as it were, to mere shadows.

M: I think that is an excellent way to put it, Socrates

S: It follows from this whole line of reasoning, Meno, that virtue appears present in
those who have it only as a gift from the gods. We will only really know about this,
however, if and when we try to investigate what virtue itself is – an investigation that
must come before that of how it comes to be in men. But the time has come for me to go. ~ Plato

The Ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls."

Top soul (Vicarious), and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren the Secret name. This corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that's where Ren came in.

Second soul (Jambi), and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power. LIGHT. The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three (Wings/Days) is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she or it is third man out...depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. The sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to Heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the land of the dead.

Number four (The Pot) is Ba, the Heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.

Number five (L.C., Lost Keys, Rosetta Stoned) is Ka, the double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the We ~ William S. Burroughs

I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones. ~ T. S. Eliot

You only get married the first time once. There was the philosophy of a generation wrapped up in a tidy little sentence ~ Carrie Vaughn

It is everything that makes a man. It is everything that makes this man. And that is who I am alive, and that is who I am dead. ~ Carew Papritz

Lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time, and fall away from the memory of those who come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying, as it were, in the wicked one - myself awaiting death among the dead - inter mortuos mortem expectans - as I have truly heard and examined, so I have reduced these things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have begun. ~ S Anthony Barnett

Adam Brown's zest for life led him down a few dark alleys and more than one dead end. Kind-hearted and wild, Adam led a life that lacked direction. God, a woman, and the U.S. Navy gave it to him. FEARLESS is a love story ... several love stories: a man for his woman, a warrior for his team, parents for kids, and soldiers for their country. There is no greater love than that a man lay down his life for his friends. Be warned - reading FEARLESS will change the way you see the world. ~ Stu Weber

Olivia watched him through a blur of tears, despising the futility of it. For there was nothing she could say to comfort a man whose family was long dead; there was no balm to heal wounds that scored a man's soul; and there was no way to make a man believe in the ties that bind. ~ Laura Lee Guhrke

And I thought how many satisfied, happy people really do exist in this world! And what a powerful force they are! Just take a look at this life of ours and you will see the arrogance and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak. Everywhere there's unspeakable poverty, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy and stupid lies... And yet peace and quiet reign in every house and street. Out of fifty thousand people you won't find one who is prepared to shout out loud and make a strong protest. We see people buying food in the market, eating during the day, sleeping at night-time, talking nonsense, marrying, growing old and then contentedly carting their dead off to the cemetery. But we don't hear or see those who suffer: the real tragedies of life are enacted somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is calm and peaceful and the only protest comes from statistics - and they can't talk. Figures show that so many went mad, so many bottles of vodka were emptied, so many children died from malnutrition. And clearly this kind of system is what people need. It,s obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren't for their silence, happiness would be quite impossible. It's a kind of mass hypnosis. Someone ought to stand with a hammer at the door of every contented man, continually banging on it to remind him that there are unhappy people around and that however happy he may be at t ~ Anton Chekhov

Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in America partially by deception. (In an 1858 debate, he flatly insisted that he had no intention of abolishing slavery in states where it was already legal  -  he had to say this in order to slow the tide of secession.) Franklin Roosevelt lied about the U.S. position of neutrality until we entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Though the public and Congress believed his public pledge of impartiality, he was already working in secret with Winston Churchill and selling arms to France.) Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra so much that it now seems like he was honestly confused. Politically, the practice of lying is essential. By the time the Lewinsky story broke, Clinton had already lied about many, many things. (He'd openly lied about his level of commitment to gay rights during the '92 campaign.) The presidency is not a job for an honest man. It's way too complex. If honesty drove the electoral process, Jimmy Carter would have served two terms and the 2008 presidential race would have been a dead heat between Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead. ~ C.S. Lewis

Just across from Bismarck stood Fort Lincoln where friends and relatives of Custer's dead cavalrymen still lived, and these emigrating Sioux could perceive such bitterness in the air that one Indian on the leading boat displayed a white flag. Yet, in accordance with the laws of human behavior, the farther downstream they traveled the less hostility they encountered, and when the tiny armada reached Standing Rock near the present border of South Dakota these Indians were welcomed as celebrities. Men, women and children crowded aboard the General Sherman to shake hands with Sitting Bull. Judson Elliot Walker, who was just then finishing a book on Custer's campaigns, had to stand on a chair to catch a glimpse of the medicine man and reports that he was wearing "green wire goggles." No details are provided, so green wire goggles must have been a familiar sight in those days. Sitting Bull mobbed by fans while wearing green wire goggles. It sounds like Hollywood. ~ Evan S. Connell

In the cross of Christ God is taking man dead-seriously so that he may open up for him the happy freedom of Easter. God takes upon himself the pain of negation and the God forsakenness of judgement to reconcile himself with his enemies and to give the godless fellowship with himself.
~ Theology of Play, p.33 ~ Jurgen Moltmann

Ah, lives there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said As he hunched and rolled in his comfortable bed: To hell with the rent ... I'll drink instead! ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Death is a beautiful naked man who looks like Apollo, and he is not satisfied with those who wither away in old age. Death is a perfectionist, he likes the young and beautiful, he wants to stroke our hair and caress the sinew that binds our muscle to the bone. He does all he can to meet us, our faces gladden his heart, and he stands in our path to challenge us because he likes a clean fair fight, and after the fight he likes to befriend us, clap us on the shoulder, and make us laugh at all the pettiness and folly of the living. At the conclusion of a battle he wanders amongst the dead, raising them up, placing laurels upon the brows of those most comely, and he gathers them together as his own children and takes them away to drink wine that tastes of honey and gives them the sense of proportion that they never had in life ~ Louis De Bernieres

The evening was a string of miserable minutes strung together in tiny clusters. Three minutes for a man shot through the shoulder; Ellis put first a finger in the entry wound and then another in the exit and when his fingers touched, he decided the man was only lightly injured and didn't need a surgeon. Three minutes to set a broken wrist and splint it with a strip of cowhide and a piece of wood from a sycamore tree. Two minutes to tourniquet a leg, then extract a piece of wire deep in the meat of it. A minute to peek under a pink, saturated bandage several inches below a slender belly button; he saw thin, red water leaking from a hole and smelled urine, knew the ball had breached the bladder. It would either heal or it wouldn't, but nothing to do about it so he set the soul aside, a case not to be operated upon. He turned a man's head looking for the source of a trickle of blood and had ten terrible minutes trying to stop torrential bleeding from under his clavicle; frantic moments during which he could get neither a finger nor a clamp around the pulsating source. All bleeding stops eventually though, and the case did not violate the rule. He took two minutes to settle his own breathing, then four minutes sewing a torn scalp, and half a minute saying a prayer over a fat, cigar-shaped dead man. After awhile, he had the impression he wasn't seeing men, but parts - an exploded chest, a blood swolled thigh, a busted jaw with its teeth spat to the wind or swallowed.

I ~ Edison McDaniels

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life. ~ T. S. Eliot

Baby that's impossible, you can't give him something you don't have. That man who just walked out of this house, he's the one who has the majority of it. Chris, he only has the tiny pieces that were left behind when it got broken ~ R.S. Burnett

If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand:
My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne;
And all this day an unaccustom'd spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead
Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave
to think!
And breathed such life with kisses in my lips,
That I revived, and was an emperor.
Ah me! how sweet is love itself possess'd,
When but love's shadows are so rich in joy! ~ William Shakespeare

he once tried to explain the war and the 18 million dead to Teket, who could not comprehend it, the number alone, let alone that many killed in one conflict. B said they never found the whole of his brother's body in Belgium. He said surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions. ~ Lily King

Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger's girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop's baby daughter has a pain in her head that won't go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don't ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife's breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.

Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it's so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G.Q.'s thesis that pro ball-players - little as some of them may want to hear it - are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working ~ David James Duncan

These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet - fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed. ~ Don DeLillo

Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass,
he walked through the woods one winter
crunching through the shinycrusted snow
stumbling into a little dell where a warm spring was
and found the grass green and weeds sprouting
and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb,
He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin
Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural
Selection that wasn't what they taught in church,
so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg,
found a seedball in a potato plant
sowed the seed and cashed in on Darwin's Natural Selection
on Spencer and Huxley
with the Burbank potato.

Young man go west;
Luther Burbank went to Santa Rosa
full of his dream of green grass in winter ever-
blooming flowers ever-
bearing berries; Luther Burbank
could cash in on Natural Selection Luther Burbank
carried his apocalyptic dream of green grass in winter
and seedless berries and stoneless plums and thornless roses brambles cactus -
winters were bleak in that bleak
brick farmhouse in bleak Massachusetts -
out to sunny Santa Rosa;
and he was a sunny old man
where roses bloomed all year
everblooming everbearing
hybrids.

America was hybrid
America could cash in on Natural Selection.
He was an infidel he believed in Darwin and Natural
Selection and the influence of the mighty deadJohn Dos Passos

Burbank Charles Darwin Darwin Herbert Spencer Huxley Luther Burbank Spencer T H Huxley Thomas H Huxley Thomas Henry Huxley Thomas Huxley