Four Dead Queens Quotes

You can trust me because I'm your friend, Keralie. And real friends, friends who care about each other, don't lie ~ Astrid Scholte

She knew Archia could easily be perceived as the least formidable of all the quadrants, as Archians mostly kept to themselves, rarely crossing the channel to the main land due to their general distrust for machinery. They focused on physical work and living good, if somewhat modest, lives. ~ Astrid Scholte

Be patient, child. Be calm. Be selfless. Wait for the right moment. Wait for your time. Rule with a steady hand. A steady heart. ~ Astrid Scholte

Sometimes failure is the beginning of success ~ Astrid Scholte

I like how art captures not only the exterior, but also the feeling and the mood of the artist. Like a memory. ~ Astrid Scholte

Loving someone means risking your heart being broken. Corra said. But those moments you are together triumphs over any darkness ~ Astrid Scholte

FOR WARREN G. HARDING, the summer of 1927 was not a good one, which was perhaps a little surprising since he had been dead for nearly four years by then. ~ Bill Bryson

And immediately his leprosy was cleansed" (Mat 8:3). To one who had lain in the grave four days He cried, "Lazarus, come forth," and the dead came forth. The stormy wind and the angry waves were hushed at a single word from Him. A legion of demons could not resist His authoritative command. ~ Arthur W. Pink

So the years passed and everyone grew old and Nell's husband died and Hilda grew to be a large, angry sort of woman very high up in local government. When Nell was eighty-four Hilda retired and they went to live at a sea-side place where Hilda had had meaningful holidays during the menopause with a woman called Audrey, now dead. ~ Jane Gardam

I can remember times coming home from a chess club at four in the morning when I was half asleep and half dead and forcing myself to pray an hour and study (the Bible) an hour. You know, I
was half out of my head-stoned almost. ~ Bobby Fischer

All the people saying mean things about me on the Internet are gonna be dead in four hundred and thirty-three days," she said, deadpan. ~ Neal Stephenson

Everything rests on the poisoned wine. If it were just the queen, I could force it down her gullet, but Declan Broekhart would run me through with that damned ceremonial sword, and if his wife's stares were daggers, he'd be dead already. ~ Eoin Colfer

You're just as dead if you fall from forty feet as you are from four thousand fathoms, that's what I say. ~ Terry Pratchett

I was always a drama queen. I remember playing in the kitchen, trying to get my mom to think I was dead and call the police. When she didn't, I would cry. I was always theatrical. I don't think any of my relatives are surprised. ~ Amy Lee

Home before the leaves fall' the soldiers all shouted to their families in August 1914 as they marched toward an enemy who felt the same way. Both sides prayed to the same god for victory, with the equal assurance that that god was on their side. Like helpless actors in a play the script of which they seemed to have no role in writing, the leaders of the nations in 1914 helplessly played their parts as hourly Europe lurched toward war until all the major countries on the continent were sucked into a gigantic maelstrom that lasted for a horrendous 1,561 days, toppled four monarchies, destroyed a centuries-old social structure, decimated thousands of towns and villages, and left a number of dead that God alone could count. As for the misery the war caused, it cannot begin to be calculated. The dead can be buried and forgotten and the villages rebuilt, but for the survivors the mental scars could not be erased except by death. ~ Jamie H. Cockfield

I spend more time with the living, than the dead now. ~ Jennifer Hotes

Flotsam said, "He thinks I shouldn't do surfboard self-defense on four squids that flip us off and stole my juices when I was rippin'. They thought it was cooleo till one of them caught my log upside his head when I snaked him on the next wave."

"What?" Ronnie said.

"All I said was," Jetsam said to Flotsam, "You should cap the little surf Nazi if you wanna turn him into part of the food chain, not torpedo him till he's almost dead in the foamy. ~ Joseph Wambaugh

It's inappropriate for the queen of the dead to be afraid of
ghosts. ~ MaryJanice Davidson

The sinner can no more raise himself from the deadness of sin than Lazarus, who had been dead four days, until Jesus came. ~ George Whitefield

You have to stand every day three or four hours of visitors. Nine-tenths of them want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead-still they will run down in three or four minutes. If you even cough or smile they will start up all over again. ~ Calvin Coolidge

He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell of baby shampoo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter of industry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center of creation, some meaning, some purpose and poetry. ~ Scott Spencer

Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sang; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead: for four hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I had four blak arrows under my belt,
Four for the greefs that I have felt,
Four for the number of ill menne
That have oppressid me now and then.
One is gone; one is wele sped;
Old Apulyaird is dead.
One is for Maister Bennet Hatch,
That burned Grimstone, walls and thatch.
One for Sir Oliver Oates,
That cut Sir Harry Shelton's throat.
Sir Daniel, ye shull have the fourt;
We shall think it fair sport.
Ye shull each have your own part,
A blak arrow in each blak heart.
Get ye to your knees for to pray;
Ye are ded theeves, by yea and nay!
JON AMEND-ALL
Of the Green Wood,
And his jolly fellaweship ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Shakespeare was a white male, but he is not a dead white male. There may be only three or four women in each Shakespeare play but they are the key to how to transform a society. They are the teachers and the leaders in a new way of thinking about relationships, hierarchies, and love. They have the focus and energy to counterbalance the authority of the ten to thirty men who inhabit each play. ~ Tina Packer

Like gamblers, baseball fans and television networks, fishermen are enamored of statistics. The adoration of statistics is a trait so deeply embedded in their nature that even those rarefied anglers the disciples of Jesus couldn't resist backing their yarns with arithmetic: when the resurrected Christ appears on the morning shore of the Sea of Galilee and directs his forlorn and skunked disciples to the famous catch of John 21, we learn that the net contained not "a boatload" of fish, nor "about a hundred and a half," nor "over a gross," but precisely "a hundred and fifty three." This is, it seems to me, one of the most remarkable statistics ever computed. Consider the circumstances: this is after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; Jesus is standing on the beach newly risen from the dead, and it is only the third time the disciples have seen him since the nightmare of Calvary. And yet we learn that in the net there were "great fishes" numbering precisely "a hundred and fifty three." How was this digit discovered? Mustn't it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writhing fish pile and started tossing them into a second pile, painstakingly counting "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... " all the way up to a hundred and fifty three, while the newly risen Lord of Creation, the Sustainer of all their beings, He who died for them and for Whom they would gladly die, stood waiting, ignored, till the heap of fish was q ~ David James Duncan

Church was doing what he often did when dropped - lying on his back with all four legs in the air, pretending to be dead in order to induce guilt in his owners. ~ Cassandra Clare

The hiking boots the outdoor adventure magazine sent me to buy - large, ungainly potato like things that I have been trying to break in for the past four days - cut into my feet and draw blood as if the were lined with cheese graters. I have come to hate these Timberlands with a fervor I usually reserve for people. Just think, the shoes I wouldn't be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in. ~ David Rakoff

I have my own set of survival techniques. I am patient. I know how to pack light. But my one might travel talent is that I can make friends with anybody. I can make friends with the dead. If there isn't anyone else around to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of sheetrock. That is why I'm not afraid to travel to the most remote places in the world, not if there are human beings there to meet. People asked me before I left, do you have friends [there]?' and I would just shake my head no, thinking to myself, But I will. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old. But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or your back, or your hip. Your hot flashes come to an end; things droop. Spots appear. Your cleavage looks like a peach pit. If your elbows faced forward, you would kill yourself. You're two inches shorter than you used to be. You're ten pounds fatter and you cannot lose a pound of it to save your soul. Your hands don't work as well as they once did and you can't open bottles, jars, wrappers, and especially those gadgets that are encased tightly in what seems to be molded Mylar. If you were stranded on a desert island and your food were sealed in plastic packaging, you would starve to death. You take so many pills in the morning you don't have room for breakfast.
You lose close friends and discover one of the worst truths of old age: they're irreplaceable. People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There's nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. ~ Nora Ephron

Ruric clung to me and shouted, "Your father." Looking down below I saw my father running after us, several alarmed guards trailing him. As I watched, the High Lord's slight demon shape began to shimmer in a remarkable transformation that stretched him out and out and up into a huge and long, black serpentine dragon. It was a glorious sight, one I'd never thought to see. He launched himself gracefully into the air amidst shouted protests from his guards, a large dragon smile on his face that showed more free and delighted emotion than I'd ever seen on his face.
... "His poor guards. An eight-member team set out at a dead run after us. They must be having a hissy fit over my father taking off like that, alone, unguarded. Although I couldn't imagine what could possibly be of threat to a four-ton, fire-breathing dragon. ~ Sunny

One day a man's son was run over by a car and he was killed and all mangled up. The father couldn't go on living, he felt ill, he cried all day, he went to a wizard and gave him all his money to bring his son back to life. The wizard said: "Go home and wait. Your son will return tonight." The father waited, but the son did not come home, so in the end he went to bed. He was just falling asleep when he heard footsteps in the kitchen. He got up feeling very happy and saw his son, he was all mangle up and had one arm missing and his head was split open, with the brains running out and he said he hated him because he'd left him in the middle of the road to go with women and it was his fault he was dead.' 'So?' 'So the father got some petrol and set fire to him.' 'I don't blame him.' I threw and finally hit the target. 'Point!' 'Four-two. ~ Niccolo Ammaniti

My father sits at the head of a table before the carcass of an enormous American turkey. What he is ashamed of is the one act of decency I have yet encountered in all the tales of our family's past. A young boy with a dead father and a dead friend bends down before a country dog and feeds it his butter sandwich. And I know that sandwich. Because he has made it for me. Two slices of that dark, unbleached Russian bread, the kind that tastes of badly managed soil and a peasant's indifference to death. On top of it, the creamiest, deadliest of American butter, slathered in thick feta-like hunks. And on top of that cloves of garlic, the garlic that is to give me strength, that is to clear my lungs of asthmatic gunk, and make of me a real garlic-eating strong man. At a table in Leningrad, and a table in deepest Queens, New York, the ridiculous garlic crunches beneath our teeth as we sit across from each other, the garlic obliterating whatever else we have eaten, and making us one. ~ Gary Shteyngart

One Monday, just for sport, Charlie grabbed an eggplant that a spectacularly wizened granny was going for, but instead of twisting it out of his hand with some mystic kung fu move as he expected, she looked him in the eye and shook her head - just a jog, barely perceptible really - it might have been a tic, but it was the most eloquent of gestures. Charlie read it as saying: O White Devil, you do not want to purloin that purple fruit, for I have four thousand years of ancestors and civilization on you; my grandparents built the railroads and dug the silver mines, and my parents survived the earthquake, the fire, and a society that outlawed even being Chinese; I am mother to a dozen, grandmother to a hundred, and great-grandmother to a legion; I have birthed babies and washed the dead; I am history and suffering and wisdom; I am a Buddha and a dragon; so get your fucking hand off my eggplant before you lose it. ~ Christopher Moore

On his way back through the plane Richard had seen women crying-- three women, four women. And he realized that there always were these women on planes, crying, with makeup in meltdown, folded over in the window seat or candidly hideous in the aisle, clutching Kleenex. Before, if he assumed anything, he assumed they were crying about boyfriends or husbands (partings or sunderings), or crying (who cared?) from toothache or curse pains or fear of flying. But now he was forty, and he knew.

Women on planes were crying because someone they love or loved is dead or dying. Every plane has them. ~ Martin Amis

On trial were two men, one in a plaid shirt, and the other with a long, ZZ Top-style beard. They looked intimated by the crowd that had turned out, even though Plaid Shirt stood six foot four. He was the main perpetrator, charged with animal cruelty. He had brought his young son along during the bear killing for which he was on trial.
The main reason the state managed to bring charges is that the hunters had made a videotape of their gruesome acts. The state trooper who confiscated the video couldn't even testify at the time of the trial, he was so emotionally overcome.
Then they showed the video in court, and I understood why. ZZ Top and Plaid Shirt cornered the bear cub. In order to preserve the integrity of the pelt, they attempted to kill the cub by stabbing it in the eyes.
It was absolutely gut-wrenching to watch. The bear struggled for its life, but Plaid Shirt kept thrusting his knife, moving back as the animal twisted frantically away, then moving forward to stab again. The bear cub screamed, and it sounded eerily as though the bear was actually crying "Mama," over and over. Plaid Shirt and ZZ Top sat unfazed in court. The bear screamed, "Mama, mama, mama." From my place in the gallery, I watched as a towering man in a police uniform burst into tears and walked out of the courtroom. At the end of the video, Plaid Shirt brought his nine-year-old son over to stand triumphantly next to the dead bear cub.
"Clearly, you deserve jail," the judge told Pla ~ Terri Irwin

Under a Certain Little Star"

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken.
May happiness not be angry if I take it for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the multiplicity of the world overlooked
each second.
My apologies to an old love for treating the new one as the first.
Forgive me far-off wars for taking my flowers home.
Forgive me open wounds for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the
abyss.
My apologies to those in railway stations for sleeping comfortably
at five in the morning.
Pardon me hounded hope for laughing sometimes.
Pardon me deserts for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
forever still and staring at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happened to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous to me.
Endure, O mystery of being that I might pull threads from your
veil.

Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and
woman.
I know that ~ Wisława Szymborska

Four centuries and more of modern thought have been, from one point of view, an experiment in the possibilities of knowledge open to man, assuming that there is no Revealed Truth. The conclusion--which Hume already saw and from which he fled into the comfort of "common sense" and conventional life, and which the multitudes sense today without possessing any such secure refuge--the conclusion of this experiment is an absolute negation: if there is no Revealed Truth, there is no truth at all; the search for truth outside of Revelation has come to a dead end. The scientist admits this by restricting himself to the narrowest of specialties, content if he sees a certain coherence in a limited aggregate of facts, without troubling himself over the existence of any truth, large or small; the multitudes demonstrate it by looking to the scientist, not for truth, but for the technological applications of a knowledge which has no more than a practical value, and by looking to other, irrational sources for the ultimate values men once expected to find in truth. The despotism of science over practical life is contemporaneous with the advent of a whole series of pseudo-religious "revelations"; the two are correlative symptoms of the same malady: the abandonment of truth. ~ Seraphim Rose

And then there was one last body that stood out from the rest. It had signs of of bruising on all four ankles and all along its side. Brownie had said that all the dogs that didn't die from being hanged were drowned, except one.
As that dog lay on the ground fighting for air, Quanis Phillips grabbed its front legs and Michael Vick grabbed its hind legs. They swung the dog over their head like a jump rope then slammed it to the ground. The first impact didn't kill it. So [they] slammed it again. The two men kept at it, alternating back and forth, pounding the creature against the ground, until at last, the little red dog was dead. ~ Jim Gorant (Author)

Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming
We're finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know ~ Neil Young

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America's "Wild West" of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father.

New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world's epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa.

Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever.

After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach.

While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced ~ James M. LaRossa Jr.

It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective. ~ A. N. Wilson

Four generations of women
"I'm a woman," Mary said to herself
heading off on a journey in a car. One of the dead, one of them dying, one of the driving, one of them just staring out. ~ Roddy Doyle

Dumbledore was having real trouble finding anyone to do the job this year." "Not surprising, is it, when you look at what's happened to the last four?" said George.
"One sacked, one dead, one's memory removed and one locked in a trunk for nine months," said Harry, counting them off on his fingers. "Yeah, I see what you mean. ~ J.K. Rowling

The four hearse-horses, especially, reared and pranced, and showed their highest action, as if they knew a man was dead, and triumphed in it. "The break us, drive us, ride us; ill-treat, abuse, and maim us for their pleasure - But they die; Hurrah, they die! ~ Charles Dickens

At home I have a blue piano.
But I can't play a note.
It's been in the shadow of the cellar door
Ever since the world went rotten.
Four starry hands play harmonies,
The Woman in the Moon sang in her boat.
Now only rats dance to the clanks.
The keyboard is in bits.
I wept for what is blue. Is dead.
Sweet angels, I have eaten
Such bitter bread. Push open
The door of heaven. For me, for now-
Although I am still alive-
Although it is not allowed ~ Else Lasker Schuler