Dead Weight Quotes

You must prune to bloom. If the dead weight is not pruned and removed, it compromises the quality, performance, and output of the vine. When you prune what's not working in your life, you make the space and place for renewal to happen and for new growth to spring forth. ~ Susan C. Young

Not a breath, not a sound - except at intervals the muffled crackling of stones that the cold was reducing to sand - disturbed the solitude and silence surrounding Janine. After a moment, however, it seemed to her that the sky above her was moving in a sort of slow gyration. In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually towards the horizon. Janine could not tear herself away from contemplating those drifting flares. She was turning with them, and the apparently stationary progress little by little identified her with the core of her being, where cold and desire were now vying with each other. Before her the stars were falling one by one and being snuffed out among the stones of the desert, and each time Janine opened a little more to the night. Breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the dead weight of others, the craziness or stuffiness of life, the long anguish of living and dying. After so many years of mad, aimless fleeing from fear, she had come to a stop at last. At the same time, she seemed to recover her roots and the sap again rose in her body, which had ceased trembling. Her whole belly pressed against the parapet as she strained towards the moving sky; she was merely waiting for her fluttering heart to calm down and establish silence within her. The last stars of the constellations dropped their clusters a little lower on the desert horizon and became s ~ Albert Camus

A HOW-TO ON DISAPPEARING

No one understands the way we break.
Not jagged. Not knife sliding between ribs.
Not the spine, cracking.

That would be too easy.

That would be being able to know that
you're broken. That would be X-rays
showing the gaps, the fissures.
Clean breaks are easier to heal.
We do not break cleanly.

We break without breaking.
Not a crack, but a fog.
We dissipate.
Body here one moment and
not here the next.

Hands working one moment and
a dead weight the next.

We watch ourselves turn
colourless. Watch ourselves
become invisible / invincible.

This way, at least the pain is our own.
That's what I wanted all along, I guess. ~ Darshana Suresh

Satisfaction is dead weight. ~ Yonason Goldson

Last night, I killed a man. If I had to, I'd do it all over again. Afterwards I slept like a baby. There's a surprising amount of physical exertion in murder - they don't call it a dead weight for nothing. ~ A.E. Rawson

All government, whatever its forms or pretenses, is a dead weight that paralyzes the free spirit and activities of the masses. ~ Emma Goldman

I am mouthy, and I get easily annoyed, and I don't know how to shoot a bow and arrow, so dystopias are a solid no from me. I'm basically Peeta from The Hunger Games, except gay. I am here for the baked goods and then basically I'm going to be dead weight. Cut your losses. ~ R. Eric Thomas

At every crossway on the path that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear that the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight that nature drags along. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck

Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past. ~ Michael Simkins

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight - matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one's own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. ~ Leon Wieseltier

As long as we're focused on spending, there are only two ways to do that: One is spend less, and Democrats have no solutions for that. Or we have pro-growth policies that make the economy grow so the dead-weight cost of government becomes a smaller percentage of the economy and therefore less expensive. ~ Grover Norquist

There is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this verse. It is the evolutionary and natural view. Of what use is it to perpetuate the misery of tuberculosis, and such diseases, as we now do? Nature's way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way, too. At present all the strong are being damaged, and their progress hindered by the dead weight of the weak limbs and the missing limbs, the diseased limbs and the atrophied limbs. The Christians to the Lions!

Our humanitarianism, which is the syphilis of the mind, acts on the basis of the lie that the King must die. The King is beyond death; it is merely a pool where he dips for refreshment. We must therefore go back to Spartan ideas of education; and the worst enemies of humanity are those who wish, under the pretext of compassion, to continue its ills through the generations. The Christians to the Lions!

Let weak and wry productions go back into the melting-pot, as is done with flawed steel castings. Death will purge, reincarnation make whole, these errors and abortions. Nature herself may be trusted to do this, if only we will leave her alone. But what of those who, physically fitted to live, are tainted with rottenness of soul, cancerous with the sin-complex? For the third time I answer: The Christians to the Lions!

Hadit calls himself the Star, the Star being the Unit of the Macrocosm; and the Snake, the Snake being the symbol of Going or Love, the Dwarf-Soul, the Spermato ~ Aleister Crowley

When most people use the word 'freedom' nowadays, they use it in the sense of the French Revolutionaries: freedom from tradition, from established social institutions, from religious doctrines, from prescriptive duties. I think that this employment of the word does much mischief. For we do not live in an age - and there are such ages - which is oppressed by the dead weight of archaic establishments and obsolete custom. The danger in our era, rather, is that the fountains of the great deep will be broken up and that the pace of alteration will be so rapid that generation cannot link with generation. Our era, necessarily, is what Matthew Arnold called an epoch of concentration. Or, at least, the thinking American needs to turn his talents to concentration, the buttressing and reconstruction of our moral and social heritage. This is a time not for anarchic freedom, but for ordered freedom. There are much older and stronger concepts of freedom than that espoused by the French Revolutionaries. In the Christian tradition, freedom is submission to the will of God. This is no paradox. As he that would save his life must lose it, so the man who desires true freedom must recognize a providential order which gives all freedoms their sanction. The theory of 'natural rights' depends upon the premise of an on alterable human nature bestowed upon man by God. Only acceptance of the divine order can give enduring freedom to a society; for this lacking, there is no reason why the strong and th ~ Russell Kirk

Okaaay. Time to go, peanut."
"Go? But I like it here! It's fun."
I sweep her into my arms. Even at dead weight, she feels like nothing. "It's all fun and games until someone gets a concussion. ~ Emma Chase

Is it not clear that to give to such women as desire it and can devote themselves to literary and scientific pursuits all the advantages enjoyed by men of the same class will lessen essentially the number of thoughtless, idle, vain and frivolous women and thus secure the [sic] society the services of those who now hang as dead weight? ~ Sarah Moore Grimke

He judges the present time in virtue of a meta-historical fact, and the incursion of this event into the present is the only force capable of throwing off the dead weight of social and political institutions which are gradually crushing the life out of our present civilization. ~ Jacques Ellul

What's this thing?" The boss looked at the package with rolling eyes.

"We don't know. It was left in the bin outside."

"We answered a call on the desk phone and we were told to go look outside in the bin, the voice said."

The boss looked at the shit standing by the chair.

"You answering calls now? Thought you two should be working along side Ritterman?" He looked at Ritterman.

"I told them to man the phone." Said Ritterman.

" Ritterman. These two are new detectives who need experience. I said take `em with you, always."

"First they need to learn the basics of handling strange objects." Ritterman held up his hands.

"Don't do anything without a pair of these." He waived his hands like a singer on stage. The two shit heads looked embarrassed.

"Anyway, what? Who's gonna open this and find out what's inside? Ritterman?" Asked the boss.

"Boss, maybe we should hand it over to forensic first and they can test it for substance. Before any of us get some horrible shit on our hands. ~ Sean P. Durham

The box didn't appear to be hampered in any way by the ornamental rug draped roguishly over it, nor by the thief hanging by one arm from the lid. It was, in a very real sense, a dead weight. Further along the lid were the remains of two fingers, owner unknown. ~ Terry Pratchett

I dropped the head and kicked it into the crowd. I say "kicked" but in truth it's a bad idea to kick a head. I learned that years ago, a lesson that cost me two broken toes. What you want to do is shove the head with the side of your foot, like you're throwing it. It's going to roll anyhow so you don't need that much force. See, the thing about severed heads is the owner no longer has any interest in minimizing the force of the blow, or any ability to do so for that matter. When you kick somebody in the head as you do from time to time, they tend to be actively trying to move themselves out of the way and the contact is lessened. A severed head is a dead weight, even if it's watching you.
And that exhausts my insights into the kicking of severed heads. Admittedly it's more than most people have to offer on the subject but there were Mayans who knew a lot more than I do. That of course is a whole different ball-game. ~ Mark Lawrence

If we change in different directions, then we don't have any future anyway, do we? I think it's possible for two people to change together, to grow together and enrich instead of diminish each other. The sum of one and one, if they're the right ones, can be infinity! But so often one person drags the other down; one person wants to go up like a balloon and the other's a dead weight. I've always wondered what it would be like if both people, if a woman and a man both wanted to go up like balloons! ~ Richard Bach

Women always think you need a man, you need a father, as if they'd be the slightest use. Men are a dead weight, they're clumsy and maladjusted. ~ Yasmina Reza

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,

its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song. ~ Mary Oliver

Indifference is the dead weight of history. ~ Antonio Gramsci

Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time. ~ William S. Burroughs

Is something wrong?" he asked.

"You seem to have forgotten that someone cut my bike in half."

"And you seem to have forgotten that I have a truck," said Miles. "I can give you a ride. To school, at least."

"No thanks," I said.

"Really. I'm not joking. Unless you're that against having anything to do with me. I don't care. You can get in line."

He turned onto the main road. The line from the notebook felt like a dead weight in my stomach.

"No, not against it." I realized with a strange sort of happy dread that we were falling back into the easy conversation we'd had at the bonfire. "But I'd like to know why you're offering."

"What do you mean?" Honest confusion crossed his face. "Isn't that the good thing to do?"

I burst out laughing. "Since when have you been good? Are you feeling guilty or something?"

"A little sentimental, maybe. My first idea was to drive up and down in front of you a few times to prove I had a car and you didn't." His tone was light and he was smiling.

Holy crap, he was smiling. A real, teeth-showing, nose-scrunching, eyes-crinkling smile.

The smile slipped off his face. "What? What's wrong?"

"You were smiling," I said. "It was kind of weird."

"Oh," he said, frowning. "Thanks."

"No, no, don't do that! The smile was better." The words felt wrong coming out of my mouth. I shouldn't say things like that to ~ Francesca Zappia

Before her the stars were falling one by one and being snuffed out among the stones of the desert, and each time Janine opened a little more to the night. Breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the dead weight of others, the craziness or stuffiness of life, the long anguish of living and dying. After so many years of mad, aimless fleeing from fear, she had come to a stop at last. ~ Albert Camus

When you're dead weight, in the right position, you win. And in reality, you wouldn't see someone my size kicking seven martial arts experts and winning. ~ Joan Severance

They say a man's inspiration is visual, but for a woman, it's the narrative.
Abandon both the narrative and the visual. Close your eyes, measure your breath.
Dead weight is sloughed off, dust swept away, forms dissolve into one atmosphere.
The rib cage opens, the lungs fill, the breast rises.
Waves sweep up the body on their swell, rocking it rhythmically.
Feet planted, the back arches, the pelvis reaches forward.
Oxygen kindles a flame, sprawling through the belly, and gathering in a warm blaze.
The hand reaches to meet the sensation.
Calligraphy spills from the inkwell.
Open your eyes, sharpen your focus, and exclaim:
There are no separations. ~ Craig Thompson

The whole dead weight of my growing fear fell upon me and shook me. Then I burst out laughing too. It was the only thing to do: and the sound of my laughter also made me understand his. The strain of physical pressure caused it
this explosion of unnatural laughter in both of us; it was an effort of repressed forces to seek relief; it was a temporary safety-valve. ~ Algernon Blackwood

Like a small business, a novel cannot afford to carry dead weight, even if it is a close family member.
It is likewise unnecessary to introduce a mother and/or father into a narrative - usually through the medium of a long telephone call on the subject of 'How's things?' - to demonstrate that the protagonist does, like all mammals, have parents. ~ Howard Mittelmark

Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I have learned or read. Since then, I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. ( ... ) I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight. ~ Emanuel Lasker

In our personal spaces, where there are no eyes to guide our better nature caressing our intentions, we sometimes gnaw in the agonizing realization that, although we charitably took on the rough task with smiling faces, our condescension has produced our worst nightmare. For a new work has triggered our insecure buttons, birthing the fear that the author may flow past our selfish desires, and find their way into the ocean of our faith, leaving us alone and desperate. And so we must, with the extremest prejudice, bomb their potential future by damming all of our congratulations. Rendering Goodreads a stale pond of green algae and used condoms. But do we not know that this same pond we all must drink from? Instead of filing another dead weight upon our self-deprecation, we should condescend to our own little devils, transforming them into loving companions with our guidance, so they may sprout wings in our charity, by praising this new work loudly to all of our friends and acquaintances. Instead of a dam, we can fashion a fountain of ascension, whose poetic mead, we may all get drunk on. Then, one day, those that we have assisted, we may one day find them returning us the favor by building us a fountain. That's my opinion on the subject anyway. This has been an exercise in poetic articulation. Signing off. ~ Sun Moon

You are dead weight. You are always trying to bring me down to your miserable state of mind. I am not going down that path - You are going to travel down that road alone. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Pedantry and bigotry are millstones, able to sink the best book which carries the least part of their dead weight. The temper of the pedagogue suits not with the age; and the world, however it may be taught, will not be tutored. ~ Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl Of Shaftesbury

To the secular arm, therefore, be delivered any and every book which, catering for the youngsters, throttles the life of the old folktales with coils of explanatory notes, and heaps on their maimed corpses the dead weight of biographical appendices. Nevertheless, that which delighted our childhood may instruct our manhood; and notes, appendices, and all the gear of didactic exposition, have their place elsewhere in helping the student, anxious to reach the seed of fact which is covered by the pulp of fiction. For, to effect this is to make approach to man's thoughts and conceptions of himself and his surroundings, to his way of looking at things and to explanation of his conduct both in work and play. Hence the folk-tale and the game are alike pressed into the service of study of the human mind. Turn where we may, the pastimes of children are seen to mimic the serious pursuits of men. ~ Edward Clodd

A hundred-eighty pounds of dead weight - all muscle - to ~ J.D. Robb

But none of the feeling which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of real people would be a decided improvement. A real person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which one's soul can assimilate. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening. ~ Marcel Proust

Think about your story in a new way,' the wise person says. 'You've been thinking of it as a loss. Now think of it as a liberation. What happened to you--it actually freed you up. And it didn't just free you up any old way. It freed you from some dead weight of the past so you could find a new home that would bring life to some part of you, maybe the best part of you. ~ Mira Kirshenbaum

Was this what they meant by hot flashes? But they didn't feel hot. Her body felt full and heavy and slow and human and absent somehow, just a weight to be carried forward without its enthusiastic cycles of fertility and rest, the crests and valleys she had never realized she counted on so much. Dead weight? Was that what she was now; an obsolete female biding its time until death? ~ Barbara Kingsolver

As our economy faces up to potential labour shortages due to our ageing population and as it moves to a new level of sophistication to compete with the rest of the world, we're going to need every Australian on board pulling their weight, rejoining the workforce, gaining new skills. Writing off individuals and communities suffering from poverty just creates a dead weight for our economy to drag along. ~ Julia Gillard

A sharp and familiar pang pierced his heart, rattled around his ribs, and then settled in his stomach like a rotting, dead weight. He took a swig of his Jack on the rocks, the burn not quite dulling the ache that had haunted him for two decades. God, he missed Anna. Enforcer's Redemption ~ Carrie Ann Ryan

She falls back like a dead weight. The red hair loosens from the hair band and spreads in the colorful surface of the pillows, her white body is in sharp contrast, the gleam in her bloodshot eyes becomes intense and shines. My aunt, lying like this, looks like a goddess in an orgasm, only that, inside, she is suffering. I close my eyes and breathe deeply. The same is happening to us, we're really disappearing. I think of the matter of our bodies, changeable, disappearing in the particles of the air while we breathe. In this room, everywhere, we are printed on the walls, in the air that settles on things. I breathe and look at her. I'm stuck in her. ~ Pat R

Where is the society which does not struggle along under a dead-weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfather? ~ Suzanne La Follette

The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.
Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.
Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end. ~ Stephen Baxter

Higher thought forms trump lower ones. In the presence of a high frequency of human consciousness, all lower thought forms ultimately drop of their own dead weight. ~ Marianne Williamson

I will go where I will go
And I will jettison all dead weight
And I will use these words for kindling
And I will sleep by the garden gate. ~ John Darnielle

Taceant Colloquia. Effugiat risus. Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. "Let conversation stop. Let laughter cease," Luke read aloud. "Here is the place where the dead delight to teach the living. ~ Cassandra Clare

We are the dead,' he said.
'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
'Not physically. Six months, a year – five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So longs as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.'
'Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! ~ George Orwell

I am now in that happy comfortable state that I do not hesitate to indulge in any fancy in regard to diet, but watch the consequences, and do not continue any course which adds to weight or bulk and consequent discomfort. ~ William Banting

Here I am, just turned fifty, and I forgot that my father isn't dead yet! ~ David Sedaris

I guess you get all my money, I said. And I'm not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding macabre.
Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I'll always take care of you.
I thought, already he's starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you're starting to get paranoid. ~ Margaret Atwood

The underlying foundation of all religion is performance - whether it's a tribal dance around a campfire to satisfy the fire god, or a dead religious activity performed week after week by an evangelical Christian with the intent of impressing his God. It's all religious performance, and God isn't impressed by our performance. What impresses Him is faith. ~ Steve McVey

A friend of the devil is a friend of mine ~ Grateful Dead

Knowledge is the heaviest weight of all. ~ Maureen Johnson

The apparition of an evil, sick unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance, and about the dead buildings in the barren air, the bodies of the soul that built the wonderland shuffled and stalked and stalked and lurched in attitudes of immemorial nightmare all around. ~ Allen Ginsberg

I didn't tell her the first part, which was this: Once upon a time, before being a new wolf tied up in the back of a Tahoe, before Club Josephine, before NARKOTIKA, there was a boy named Cole St. Clair, and he could do anything. And the weight of that possibility was so unbearable that he crushed himself before it had a chance to. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Hugging himself, Oscar leaned against the pantry wall. For two days all he had wanted was for Caleb to come back, and now he was back and Oscar had made a mess of things: he had angered half the customers and confused the other half, and the coin boxes did not look as they should, and [rich, noble] people were complaining about him, and he couldn't look at anybody, and [redacted] was dead, and Oscar was odd.
'What if he doesn't keep me? ~ Anne Ursu

The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world. ~ Hilary Mantel

The ability to forge a unique path with occasional dips, detours, and even dead ends presents a better chance for fulfillment. Plus, a jungle gym provides great views for many people, not just those at the top. On a ladder, most climbers are stuck staring at the butt of the person above. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

The delta blues is a low-down, dirty shame blues. It's a sad, big wide sound, something to make you think about people who are dead or the women who left you. ~ David Edwards

Two dead men changed the course of my life that fall. One of them I knew and the other I'd never laid eyes on until I saw him in the morgue. The first was Pete Wolinsky, an unscrupulous private detective I'd met years before through Byrd-Shine Investigations, where I'd served my apprenticeship. I worked for Ben Byrd and Morley Shine for three years, amassing the six thousand hours I needed for my license. The two were old-school private eyes, hard-working, tireless, and inventive. While Ben and Morley did business with Pete on occasion, they didn't think much of him. He was morally shabby, disorganized, and irresponsible with money. ~ Sue Grafton

Look closer if you wish.
My brother's [butterfly] collection.
He went to the furthest reaches of the earth in his quest for the purest specimen of beauty.
And when he found it, he stuck a pin through its heart.
He's dead now.
Cholera.
In the tropics.
Struck down in his relentless pursuit of beauty.
Perhaps it was beauty's revenge to stop his heart when he had stopped so many others. ~ Charles Dickens

When I was 6 years old, I was in a rock band that was horrible called 'Dead End.' The name kind of described us. People liked us; we would go and perform at coffee houses and stuff. ~ Aaron Carter

Hugging trees has a calming effect on me. I'm talking about enormous trees that will be there when we are all dead and gone. I've hugged trees in every part of this little island. ~ Gerry Adams

I don't think of myself as a writer. I'm troubled and stupid like everyone else. I grew up with the streets. I have dead friends, friends in prison, friends who are prostitutes, on drugs, drunk, married to shitty men. I write because I need to write, to make sense of life. Honesty is everything to me. ~ Mian Mian

Isn't it weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

We were all too human then, the vast ocean surrounding us and the tiny island we inhabited. We were two small beating hearts in this world, yet what we sought now seemed enormous. What we wanted and what could be created between us, a spark of life, so small and fragile, was too overwhelming to fully comprehend. My heart beat heavily in my chest with the weight of what we were trying for. ~ Meredith Wild

When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life. ~ Jack Henry Abbott

Women get boob jobs to give themselves a certain edge. Frankly, I don't see why they nearly kill themselves trying to diet off their equally bulbous hips. ~ Kim Brittingham

In seeking for justice men seek for the mean or neutral, for the law is the mean. Again, customary laws have more weight, and relate to more important matters, than written laws, and a man may be a safer ruler than the written law, but not safer than the customary law. ~ Aristotle.

If it's time to let go, JUST LET GO. You can't carry on through life with extra weight on your conscience. ~ Shannon Leto

There's a jangle to the music of the dead. I mean that certain something that's so happy and so sad at the same time. The notes almost make a perfect harmony, but don't. Then they do but quickly crash into dissonance. They simmer in that sweet in-between rhythm section rattling along all the while. Chords collapse chaotically into one another and just when you think it's gonna spill into total nonsense, it stands back up and comes through sweet as a lullaby on your mami's lips. Songs that'll make people tap their feet and drink melancholically but not realize the twisting genius lurking within until generations later. ~ Daniel Jose Older

Now I know... we have at least two friends!... Cillie von Leiden and the hunchback... not bad in our situation... or, come right down to it, no matter where and when, peace, dead calm, wars, convulsions... so many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don't know what to do with them... shovelsful!... but hearts?... very rare! ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Loden loves guns, loves to talk about them. Right now he's trying to talk about them with me, a distinctly trying experience for I keep shepherding the conversation back to dead bodies which Loden clearly doesn't enjoy very much. You would think that a man who felt comfortable extolling the virtues of hollow point bullets ("Expands to twice its size and just thumps that person.") would be okay talking about dead bodies, but apparently not. "You just cringe," he said when I mentioned the prospect of shooting into human cadaver tissue. Then he made a noise that I transcribed in my notes as olllggg. ~ Mary Roach

Trust me, Anita, if you get dead, especially if he blames himself in any way, he will be a force of destruction looking for a place to be aimed. And he's blamed himself for introducing you to Olaf here from the get-go. If Olaf did to you what he's done to some of his other victims, Edward would drown the world in blood to erase those images. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

One week, one strong. One scared, one bold. I was beginning to understand though, that there were no such things as absolutes, not in life, or in people. Like Owen said, it was day by day, if not moment by moment. All you could do was take on as much weight as you can bear. And if you're lucky, there's someone close enough to shoulder the rest. ~ Sarah Dessen

LADY BRACKNELL. May I ask if it is in this house that your invalid friend Mr. Bunbury resides?

ALGERNON. [Stammering.] Oh! No! Bunbury doesn't live here. Bunbury is somewhere else at present. In fact, Bunbury is dead,

LADY BRACKNELL. Dead! When did Mr. Bunbury die? His death must have been extremely sudden.

ALGERNON. [Airily.] Oh! I killed Bunbury this afternoon. I mean poor Bunbury died this afternoon.

LADY BRACKNELL. What did he die of?

ALGERNON. Bunbury? Oh, he was quite exploded.

LADY BRACKNELL. Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity.

ALGERNON. My dear Aunt Augusta, I mean he was found out! The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.

LADY BRACKNELL. He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice. And now that we have finally got rid of this Mr. Bunbury, may I ask, Mr. Worthing, who is that young person whose hand my nephew Algernon is now holding in what seems to me a peculiarly unnecessary manner? ~ Oscar Wilde

If he was right, here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond - bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man. ~ Wilkie Collins

When they were silent for a moment the quiet weight of the house pressed down from all around them. ~ Shirley Jackson

But what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus' love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later, Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but eventually caught some other disease. He fed the ten thousands, and the next day they were hungry again. But we remember his love. It wasn't that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers. ~ Shane Claiborne

You ARE Zaphod Beeblebrox?'
'Yeah,' said Zaphod, 'but don't shout it out or they'll all want one.'
'THE Zaphod Beeblebrox?'
'No, just A Zaphod Beeblebrox, didn't you hear I come in six packs?'
'But sir,' it squealed, 'I just heard on the sub-ether radio report. It said you were dead ... '
'Yeah, that's right, I just haven't stopped moving yet. ~ Douglas Adams

Once again, I had that feeling of drowning when I hadn't even known I was in the pool ~ Charlaine Harris