Dead Towns Quotes

Names came patterning into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference. ~ Sebastian Faulks

Dead towns are the Cathedrals of Silence. They, too, have their gargoyles, singular figures, exaggerated, dubious, set in high profile. They stand out from the mass of grey, which takes all it has in the way of character, its twitchings of stagnant life from them. Some have been distorted by solitude, others grimace with a directionless fervour; here there are masks of cherished lust, there faces ceaselessly sculpted and furrowed by mysticism. Human gargoyles, the only figures of interest in this monotonous population. ~ Georges Rodenbach

Quick, I told myself. Try to remember what you learned from Jimbo's Self Defence for Young Ladies. Jimbo was a beefy man with prison tats.
"Go into the nearest dark alley," I recalled Jimbo saying. "Freeze like a rabbit or the creature you desire your attacker to mistake you for. If your attacker shouts out to you, respond politely - maybe your optimism will change his mind. If you're about to get into an elevator with a man you feel uncomfortable spending time with in a small, escapeless room, head right in. Remember , fear i an irrational emotion, you should probably ignore it."
Armed with these tips, I hung a right into the nearest dead-end, curled into a ball and started rolling. ~ The Harvard Lampoon

With his back to us, Sean tugs the halter from the mare's head. She kicks out, but he steps out of the way as if it were nothing at all. With a shake of her mane, she leaps mightily into the water. For a moment she struggles over the waves, and then she is swimming. Just a wild black horse in a deep blue sea full of the ashes of other dead boys. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

They could play an endless game of hide-and -seek in so many rooms and up and down the halls that intersected and turned into dead-end porches and rooms full of wax begonias and elephant's- ears, or rooms full of trunks. She remembered the nights
the moon vine, the everblooming Cape jessamines, the verbena smelling under running feet, the lateness of dancers. ~ Eudora Welty

I saw this thing years ago, where somebody filled a gymnasium with ping-pong balls and mousetraps. And then somebody threw just one more ping-pong ball in there, and literally, in five seconds, the room was popping. And then it was dead. And that's how it was with 'Dallas.' Just ... 'boom!' ~ Patrick Duffy

People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead. ~ Arundhati Roy

She is Living and I'm Dead, but I'd like to believe we're both human. Call me an idealist. ~ Isaac Marion

I have been in the series for over 3 years - 3 series. There will be a fourth series next year which of course I won't be in because I'm now dead. So in total I appeared in 25 episodes. ~ Richard Briers

It used to be all black, like my mother's. When I danced with the Lord of the Dead for the first time, he said it was beautiful, and he ran his fingers though it. All the hair turned white around them, out of jealousy. That's why I only have five black streaks left. Those are the parts he touched. ~ Seanan McGuire

The country is lyric, the town dramatic. When mingled, they make the most perfect musical drama. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Don't you love fall?" Stacey asked. "All the little festivals, the changing leaves, kids in Halloween costumes, the dead spewing up out of their graves to haunt the living ... ~ J.L. Bryan

BONE WHITE, BLOOD RED. ALONG THIS PATH YOU'LL SOON BE DEAD. ~ Kerri Maniscalco

The dead boy in his arms hung with his head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape of street or wall or paling sky or the figures of the children who stood blessing themselves in the gray light. This man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads and the women stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world. ~ Cormac McCarthy

I am afraid of dying-but being dead, oh yes, that to me is often an appealing prospect. ~ Kathe Kollwitz

No matter what I do, my songs come out in a certain style, and if that sounds like Dead Kennedys, then there's probably a reason for it. Don't forget, I wrote most of those songs, music and lyrics. ~ Jello Biafra

From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

And if I use the opportunity to kill you and leave?" the giant said in a tone half-serious half-arch.
"I have never known warriors to be dishonourable. Should you prove me wrong, we will all be dead anyway. There is nothing so ugly as reneging a promise, wouldn't you agree?"
The giant clenched his teeth and looked down. "I would," he murmured. ~ Michelle Franklin

If someone kills your family you don't rest until they are dead. ~ C.S. Pacat

The moment I do any puppy dog acting, I think the joke is dead. It's in the truth of how I play it, and the real painful honesty that I approach my performance with. ~ Jason Gann

I have no idea what the record for being effectively dead is, but Fabrice Muamba didn't seem to have broken it. ~ Nick Hornby

'Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa. ~ Iain Banks

I've noticed that when people are joking they're usually dead serious, and when they're serious, they're usually pretty funny. ~ Jim Morrison

Among these temples there is one which far surpasses all the rest, whose grandeur of architectural details no human tongue is able to describe; for within its precincts, surrounded by a lofty wall, there is room enough for a town of five hundred families. ~ Hernan Cortes

The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain - until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released. ~ Willa Cather

Down every hall is a gruesome tangle of impossible creatures, and every one of them is split open or strung with barbs or dragging their insides after them, flailing along on shattered limbs or shredded wings or blasted stumps.
I've got the pistol, half a can of spray and a handful of useless shotgun slugs.
I'm dead. ~ Bill Blais

But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death. ~ Thomas Mann

Stay back,"I warned. "Stay away from him." They kept coming. "Stay back!" I yelled. They stopped. Except for one. "Rose," came a soft voice. "Drop the sword." My hands shook. I swallowed. "Get away from us." "Rose." The voice spoke again, a voice that my soul would have known anywhere. Hesitantly, I let myself finally become aware of my surroundings, let the details sink in. I let my eyes focus on the features of the man standing there. Dimitri's brown eyes, gentle and firm, looking down on me. "It's okay," he said. "Everything's going to be okay. You can let go of the sword." My hands shook even harder as I fought to hold on to the hilt. "I can't." The words hurt coming out. "I can't leave him alone. I have to protect him." " you have," said Dimitri. The sword fell out of my hands, landing with a clatter on the wooden floor. I followed, collapsing on all fours, anything to cry but unable to. Dimitri's arms wrapped around me as he helped me up. Voices swarmed around us, and one by one, I recognised people I knew and trusted. ~ Richelle Mead

The world contains a lot of dead people. ~ John Green

I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

For a moment, my lights picked out like searchlights the girl's naked body, slight as a child's, ivory white against the dead white of the snow, her hair bright as spun glass. She did not look in my direction. Motionless, she kept her eyes fixed on the walls moving slowly towards her, a glassy, glittering circle of solid ice, of which she was the centre. Dazzling flashes came from the ice-cliffs far over her head; below, the outermost fringes of ice had already reached her, immobilised her, set hard as concrete over her feet and ankles. I watched the ice climb higher, covering knees and thighs, saw her mouth open, a black hole in the white face, heard her thin agonised scream. ~ Anna Kavan

Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break a dead resistance in the mortal's heart ~ Sri Aurobindo

if I don't fight, I'm dead for sure. And I'd rather fight and feel hope than succumb to hopelessness. ~ Ella Summers

He could see now that asking the dead about his father was nearly useless, so burdened were they with their own losses and regrets and distractions. He had no right to press them. It was not enough merely to let them speak. If anything, he should try to bring them comfort, to shorten their suffering. Anything else was selfish, thoughtless, at best redundant. He was also finding it too easy to take on their pain, perhaps because he was more like them than he wanted to admit. Or rather, he had let himself become like them, a wanderer, someone lost in a world he had hewn from his own pain. ~ Ari Berk

FLUELLEN-
Ay, he was porn at Monmouth, Captain Gower. What call you the town's name where Alexander the Pig was born!
GOWER-
Alexander the Great.
FLUELLEN-
Why, I pray you, is not pig great? the pig, or the great, or the mighty, or the huge, or the magnanimous, are all one reckonings, save the phrase
is a little variations. ~ William Shakespeare

A life of mere pleasure! A little while, in the spring-time of the senses, in the sunshine of prosperity, in the jubilee of health, it may seem well enough. But how insufficient, how mean, how terrible when age comes, and sorrow, and death! A life of pleasure! What does it look like when these great changes beat against it
when the realities of eternity stream in? It looks like the fragments of a feast, when the sun shines upon the withered garlands, and the tinsel, and the overturned tables, and the dead lees of wine. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Rage had consumed her. She hadn't wanted to just murder him. She had wanted to empty her gun into his chest. And then she wanted to fill the holes with burning oil and dance in his still-warm blood. She had felt dead inside. ~ Karin Slaughter

In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco
the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity
had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. ~ Joseph Conrad

Being with Jody and Mark and Cal was beginning to weigh on my nerves, like a dull wooden block on the strings of a piano. I was afraid that at any moment my control would snap, and I would start babbling about how I couldn't read and couldn't write and how I must be just about the only person who had stayed awake for a solid month without dropping dead of exhaustion. ~ Sylvia Plath

They come from Mobile. Aiken. From Newport News. From Marietta. From Meridian. And the sounds of these places in their mouths make you think of love. When you ask them where they are from, they tilt their heads and say "Mobile" and you think you've been kissed. They say "Aiken" and you see a white butterfly glance off a fence with a torn wing. They say "Nagadoches" and you want to say "Yes, I will." You don't know what these towns are like, but you love what happens to the air when they open their lips and let the names ease out. ~ Toni Morrison

I read all these stories that I don't know anything about politics. But I must know something. I've had some good victories in Congress, and I've survived this town for four years. ~ Donald T. Regan

This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai: if by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way.
his whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling. ~ Tsunetomo Yamamoto

O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead? ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Lividity is what happens to a person's blood after death. The heart stops, blood pressure collapses, liquid blood drains and sinks and settles into the lowest parts of the body under the simple force of gravity. It rests there and over a period of time it stains the skin liverish purple. Somewhere between three and six hours later the color fixes permanently, like a developed photograph. A guy who falls down dead on his back will have a pale chest and a purple back. Vice versa for a guy who falls down dead on his front. But Brubaker's lividity was all over the place. ~ Lee Child

The guns weren't of Mirajin make. Amonpourian. Stupid-looking things. Ornate and carved, made by hand instead of machine, and charged at twice what they were worth because someone had gone to the trouble of making them pretty. It didn't matter how pretty something was, it'd kill you just as dead. That, I'd learned from Shazad. ~ Alwyn Hamilton

How crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead ~ Tim O'Brien

Who was the Thief that she would love him? A youth, just a boy with hardly a beard and no sense at all ... A liar, she thought, an enemy, a threat. He was brave, a voice inside her said, he was loyal ... A fool, she answered back. A fool and a dead one. She ached with emptiness. ~ Megan Whalen Turner