Dead Rules Quotes

Mars knew that love wasn't all red-paper valentines and candy hearts. Love wasn't always joy. Love could be hot-blooded pain down to the bone. Sometimes love was despair. And sometimes love was wrong. ~ Randy Russell

The science fiction writer cuts out her heart. It is a thousand hearts. It is all the hearts she will ever have. It is her only child's dead heart. It is the heart of herself when she is old and nothing she ever wrote can be revised again. It is a heart that says with its wet beating mouth: Time is the same thing as light. Both arrive long after they began, bearing sad messages. How lovely you are. I love you.
The science fiction writer steals her heart from herself to bring it into the light. She escapes her old heart through a smoke hole and becomes a self-referencing system of imperfect, but elegant, memory. She sews up her heart into her own leg and gives birth to it twenty years later on the long highway to Ohio. The heat of herself dividing echoes forward and back, and she accretes, bursts, and begins again the long process of her own super-compression until her heart is an egg containing everything. She eats of her heart and knows she is naked. She throws her heart into the abyss and it falls a long way, winking like a red star. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

you're going to find most of the rules we have really do make sense. Don't murder. Don't steal. Don't rape. Don't beat people up. Don't be an insufferable asshole. But if you're similarly rational, you're going to realize that some of the rules and norms don't feel as black and white to you. A few that I decided didn't jibe: Everyone must be insured, so pay $1200 per month for it. Tattoos are for wackos and frat boys. Never renege on a past choice that is ruining your life. ~ Johnny B. Truant

Light can be gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, bare, living, dead, misty, clear, hot, dark, violet, springlike, falling, straight, sensual, limited, poisonous, calm and soft. ~ Sven Nykvist

Parmida had never believed in unicorns, not until a stroll through the forests of Sunneth Dol convinced her otherwise. She was a young human woman living in a world where magick was dead and magickal creatures a myth. Elves and fae and magickal beasts had long ago shed their skin and left their bones. It was a world where humans alone now existed, walking in the dark of night, always looking over their shoulder for their inevitable extinction, as if nature were waiting to absorb them next back into her soil. ~ Ash Gray

You are my heiress now. --Malaxia
I am not a witch! --Liana
St. Michel the Archangel, get down here. --Jettaret
I have wept for the living and the dead.
What good did it do them? --Alberge ~ Wendy Joseph

Rachel snatched her hand back. Sorry, I forgot the rules. Everything's a joke until it's not, and words don't mean anything until you want them to. ~ Kit Rocha

Things it is not polite to discuss at the dinner table: politics, religion, and the walking dead. ~ Mira Grant

At 13, I was a big, totally uncoordinated, hopeless football player. I responded to somebody else's rules, and I stayed just good enough to get a scholarship to Columbia, which was looking for scholar-athletes. ~ Brian Dennehy

As I stomped across the school grounds, all I could see was Cal sitting with my dad in some manly room with leather chairs and dead animals on the wall, chomping on cigars as my dad formally signed me away to him. They probably even high-fived. ~ Rachel Hawkins

At its worst human life is not tragic but unmeaning. The soul is broken, but life lingers on. As the will fails, the mask of tragedy falls aside. What remains is only suffering. The last sorrow cannot be told. If the dead could speak we would not understand them. We are wise to hold to the semblance of tragedy; the truth unveiled would only blind us. ~ John N. Gray

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. ~ Thornton Wilder

Every time I thought I understood the rules, they changed. Why was it that the damn rules always seemed to change for the worse? ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

I was born bucking the idea that I should have to be anywhere that I don't like or talk to people who make me feel dead or trapped. ~ Jenny Slate

When Stacey Curtis found the dead man on the bed, she knew it was time to get her own apartment. ~ Wendy Clinch

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality. ~ Terry Pratchett

Up telephone poles,
Which rear, half out of leavage
As though they would shriek
Like things smothered by their own
Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts.
In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows
At night to keep it out of the house
The glass is tinged with green, even so,
As the tendrils crawl over the fields.
The night the Kudzu has
Your pasture, you sleep like the dead.
Silence has grown oriental
And you cannot step upon the ground ...
ALL: Kudzu by James Dickey ~ James Dickey

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ] ~ Jim Jarmusch

We ain't dead
we are only off being pirates. ~ Mark Twain

There was no convincing him that only a fool chased the approval of a dead man. ~ Alex London

Anything for my little brother."

His smile turned impish. "So I could ask for your sports car and you would give me that?"

"Ha ha. No, I would design you your own sports car. Just like I did five ages ago when you turned fifteens. Why, do you want another one?" I asked.

"No, I was just teasing you. I like my car just fine. It's black and sleek and sophisticated," he said.

"Just like your cold, dead heart."

Hades laughed. "You're terrible to me, you know that? ~ Darinne Paciotti

We are all dead men on leave. ~ Eugen Levine

I don't believe he deserves the thousands of poems I've written about him, but life doesn't follow rules. We do things for people who don't necessarily deserve it. But we liked it, we loved it and fell in love enough to write about it. ~ Dominic Riccitello

In the writings of many contemporary psychics and mystics (e.g., Gopi Krishna, Shri Rajneesh, Frannie Steiger, John White, Hal Lindsay, and several dozen others whose names I have mercifully forgotten) there is a repeated prediction that the Earth is about to be afflicted with unprecedented calamities, including every possible type of natural catastrophe from Earthquakes to pole shifts. Most of humanity will be destroyed, these seers inform us cheerfully. This cataclysm is referred to, by many of them, as "the Great Purification" or "the Great Cleansing," and is supposed to be a punishment for our sins.

I find the morality and theology of this Doomsday Brigade highly questionable. A large part of the Native American population was exterminated in the 19th century; I cannot regard that as a "Great Cleansing" or believe that the Indians were being punished for their sins. Nor can I think of Hitler's death camps, or Hiroshima or Nagasaki, as "Great Purifications." And I can't make myself believe that the millions killed by plagues, cancers, natural catastrophes, etc., throughout history were all singled out by some Cosmic Intelligence for punishment, while the survivors were preserved due to their virtues. To accept the idea of "God" implicit in such views is logically to hold that everybody hit by a car deserved it, and we should not try to get him to a hospital and save his life, since "God" wants him dead.

I don't know who are the worst sinners on this p ~ Robert Anton Wilson

The knowledge of the purpose of the success that you receive by grace in every area will keep us from pride and the love of money ~ Sunday Adelaja

At the top of the game, you play by different rules. ~ House MD

Up in Illinois, we've forgotten what it's all about. I mean the dead, up in our town, tonight, heck, they're forgotten. Nobody goes to sit and talk to them. Boy, that's lonely. That's really sad. But here-- why, shucks. It's both happy and sad. It's all firecrackers and skeleton toys down here in the plaza and up in that graveyard now are all the Mexican dead folks with the families visiting and flowers and candles and singing and candy. I mean it's almost like Thanksgiving, huh? And everyone set down to dinner, but only half the people able to eat, but that's no mind, they're THERE. It's like holding hands at a séance with your friends, but some of the friends gone. ~ Ray Bradbury

I fall short of thy glory every day by spending hours unprofitably, by thinking that the things I do are good, when they are not done to thy end, nor spring from the rules of thy Word.

[From the prayer, Shortcomings] ~ Arthur Bennett

Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies. ~ David Wong

When I tried to get 'Stargate' made, I took it to every studio in Hollywood and every studio said, 'Sci-fi is dead. It's a dead genre. No one wants to see science fiction anymore.' And I had to go and raise the money independently to make that movie. ~ Dean Devlin

Your music, your lyrics, the leaden prose of your life that proves that everything you are and are not, the structures you build to make futility seem like meaning, the dead and living – who will soon be dead, who will soon be gone, who will soon be smoke – rising in columns and forming clouds in the night sky. For now and ever, by the will of dead and dying gods. ~ Joseph Fink

Such threats and promises often succeed in creating stable human hierarchies and mass-cooperation networks, as long as people believe that they reflect the inevitable laws of nature or the divine commands of God, rather than just human whims. All large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity. 'If you sacrifice ten bulls to the sky god, the rain will come; if you honour your parents, you will go to heaven; and if you don't believe what I am telling you – you'll go to hell.' As long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the same stories, they all follow the same rules, making it easy to predict the behaviour of strangers and to organise mass-cooperation networks. Sapiens often use visual marks such as a turban, a beard or a business suit to signal 'you can trust me, I believe in the same story as you'. Our chimpanzee cousins cannot invent and spread such stories, which is why they cannot cooperate in large numbers. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The Living do everything so vibrantly, the Dead think. Their blood sprays like party champagne, they hoot and howl like a gospel choir. Even in their agony, they are enviable. ~ Isaac Marion

I think of life as very much like a game. The one who created it gave us the rules by which it is to be played, rules designed to help us win, rules to help us be happy. The problem is many times we choose to play by our own rules, and then we're at a loss to understand why we never win. ~ Julie Lessman

Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead, Through which the living Homer begged his bread ~ Thomas Seward

This is what I decided:
Chloe is gone. She is never coming back. And the way I've been acting would hurt her. For at least an hour, I switch places with her in my mind-I am dead and Chloe is alive. How would she handle it? She would cry. She would be sad. She would miss me. But she wouldn't stop living. She would let people comfort her. She would sleep in her own room and smile at the memories as she drifted to sleep. And she would probably punch Galen Forza. Which brings me to what else I decided:
Galen Forza is a jerk. The details are hazy, but I'm pretty sure he had something to do with my accident on Monday. Also, he's a bit weird. Staring habit aside, he keeps popping up everywhere. Every time he does, I handle it with the grace of a rhino on stilts. So I'm switching my schedule as soon as I get to school. There is no good reason I should humiliate myself for seven periods a day. ~ Anna Banks

A hero is not measured by the lives that he has saved. A hero is measured by the number of the dead that he did not join. ~ Robert J.A. Gilbert

There are only two kinds of persons: those dead in sin and those dead to sin. ~ Leonard Ravenhill

I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more- from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people ... If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence. ~ Jack Welch

The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy, ~ Jack Spicer

We look to the East for a wisdom that we shall not use - and to the sleeper for the secret that we shall not find. So, I say, what of the night, the terrible night? The darkness is the closet in which your lover roosts her heart, and that night-fowl that caws against her spirit and yours, dropping between you and her the awful estrangement of his bowels. The drip of your tears in his implacable pulse. Night people do not bury their dead, but on the neck of you, their beloved and waking, sling the creature, husked of its gestures. And where you go, it goes, the two of you, your living and her dead, that will not die; to daylight, to life, to grief, until both are carrion. ~ Djuna Barnes

Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he'd buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open. ~ Margaret Atwood