How To Be Dead Quotes

Every time you tell a lie an angel punches a unicorn in the face with a kitten. ~ Dave Turner

Being a grown up was rubbish, Dave decided. ~ Dave Turner

Dave gazed at Melanie like Professor Brian Cox eyeing up a particularly thought-provoking mountain range. ~ Dave Turner

Eric walks toward me, and I back away by instinct. I try not to be afraid of him, but I know how smart he is and that if I'm not careful he'll notice that I keep staring at her, and that will be my undoing. ~ Veronica Roth

The only thing I regret about age are the wrinkles. But I have high hopes
for this new almond cream! Do you know, that Italian apothecary promises the cream will make one's
skin as soft as a baby's cheek? Once your child arrives, we'll have a viable comparison. Not having seen
a baby in years, how would I know what its skin looks like?"
"I'm glad my condition will prove to be of use," Esme said rather tartly. ~ Eloisa James

Ambition is, if not actively corrupting, corroding. To simply be happy is not enough; to bake a really good pie or play Monopoly with the kids, go out for a game of tennis with a friend--not enough. The wanting corrodes. I thought I was a prodigy until I met a few. I reached for the brush, the light, eventually for the words, and perfection evaded me--even a shadow of what I could see in my mind evaded me until something simply broke, or rather grew: a membrane that sealed me to the past, away from the glassy world. I suppose genius is no picnic, but to be moderately talented is a chronic wound. 'Human speech is like a kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.' How do we adjust to that, what kind of answer is there to such disappointment? To not being able to make what seems so possible to make, play what seems so easy for others to play? To knowing that Flaubert, who occupies another planet from me, felt himself to be a dullard? To be stuck with kettles. ~ Sallie Tisdale

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue. ~ Anne Michaels

Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How 'substantial' does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal? ~ Nancy Gibbs

I can't tell you how terribly glad I am that you're going to be all right," George said, rather thickly. "I...I wouldn't know how to act without a twin. ~ Sarah Brazytis

Reality is painful and imperfect ... That's just the way it is, that's how we distinguish it from dreams. When something seems absolutely lovely we think it can only be a dream, and we pinch ourselves just to be sure we're really not dreaming - if it hurts it's because we're not dreaming. Reality can hurt us, even those moments when it may seem to us to be a dream. You can find everything that exists in the world in books - sometimes truer in colors, and without the real pain of everything that really does exist. Given a choice between life and books, my son, you must choose books ~ Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Survival here means simply an incomplete death, not a partial life
to be trapped in a gap between the living and the dead. If I had a thousand tongues, I would not try to describe the agony! ~ Matthew Pearl

That was how his pen finally designed his sculpture; in the center the weak,
confused, arrogant, soon to be destroyed young man holding cup a loft, behind him the idyllic child, clear-eyed, munching his grapes, symbol of joy
; between them the tiger skin. The Bacchus, hollow within himself, flabby, reeling, already old; the Satyr,
eternally young and gay, symbol of man's childhood and naughty innocence ~ Irving Stone

I know that I'll move on, I tell myself I'll find me something better
I'll let go and just forget her
She was no good for me
Deep down I know that's the way it has to be so
How come I still can't open this letter
I can't forget her... ~ James Morrison

I want to be a part of something, and when we define movies now based on how they do on the weekend. We live in a society of "thumbs up, thumbs down." ~ Kevin Costner

I heard Gillian say, with a laugh, "At this point, does anyone expect the liberals not to be total hypocrites?" She was oblivious to the possibility that perhaps not everyone present shared her views, and I thought, You're sixteen. How can you already be a Republican? ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

I wanted, for so long, for someone to understand me better than I understood myself, to take control of me, to save me, to make it all better. I thought that the hardest part of a loving, mutually healing relationship would be showing my vulnerable, raw spots to a person, even though I'd been hurt so many times before. This has not been the hardest part.

The actual hardest part has been realizing that no one, no matter how compassionate and kind they are, will say the perfect things always. Myself included. The hardest part has been learning to communicate what I need, to hear what others need, to tell others how to tell me what they need. Intimacy takes communication. A lot of it.

We all have triggers. I don't know your triggers, and you don't know mine. No matter how much I love or trust you, you cannot possibly know exactly the words I need to hear, the words I don't want to hear, and the way I like to be touched.

And how strange that we expect these things of each other. How strange (and self-sabotaging) that we refuse to get into relationships and friendships with people unless they treat us in just that perfect way.

We've been raised to want fairy tales. We've been raised to wait for flawless saviors to rescue us. But the savior isn't flawless and the savior is not coming. The savior is you. The savior is still learning. The savior is never done learning. The savior is a human being.

Forget perfect. Forget flawles ~ Vironika Tugaleva

I am nothing! If you could know the dream of what I would like to be, you would realize how little I have accomplished. ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski

How long will it take to get to Venice?" she asked.
"It shouldn't be too much longer," Daniel almost whispered into her ear.
"You sound like a pilot who's been in a holding pattern for an hour, telling his passengers 'just another ten minutes' for the fifth time," Luce teased.
When Daniel didn't respond, she looked up at him. He was frowning in confusion. The metaphor was lost on him.
"You've never been on a plane," she said. "Why should you when you can do this?" She gestured at his gorgeous beating wings. "All the waiting and taxiing would probably drive you crazy."
"I'd like to go on a plane with you. Maybe we'll take a trip to the Bahamas. People fly there, right?"
"Yes." Luce swallowed. "Let's." She couldn't help thinking how many impossible things had to happen in precisely the right way for the two of them to be able to travel like a normal couple. It was too hard to think about the future right now, when so much was at stake. The future was as blurry and distant as the ground below-and Luce hoped it would be as beautiful.
"How long will it really take?"
"Four, maybe five hours at this speed."
"But won't you need to rest? Refuel?" Luce shrugged, still embarrassingly unsure of how Daniel's body worked. "Won't your arms get tired?"
He chuckled.
"What?"
"I just flew in from Heaven, and boy, are my arms tired." Daniel squeezed her waist, teasing. "The idea of my arms ever tiring of holding you is absurd. ~ Lauren Kate

Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched. ~ Jack Kornfield

The blade hovered between us. I could kill him. He could kill me. That's how it was meant to be - there could be nothing else between us now. ~ Jill Criswell

Love is such a grace as we know not how to be without. A soldier may as well be without his weapons, an artist without his pencil, a musician without his instrument, as a Christian can be without love. ~ Thomas Watson

Sensible Catholics have for generations been ignoring the views on contraception held by reactionary old men in the Vatican, but alas, since it is the business of all religious doctrines to keep their votaries in a state of intellectual infancy (how else do they keep absurdities seeming credible?), insufficient numbers of Catholics have been able to be sensible. ~ A.C. Grayling

I think about how truly interesting and odd it is that when a woman marries, traditionally she loses her name, becoming absorbed by the husband's family name - she is in effect lost, evaporated from all records under her maiden name. I finally understand the anger behind feminism - the idea that as a woman you are property to be conveyed between your father and your husband, but never an individual who exists independently. And on the flip side, it is also one of the few ways one can legitimately get lost - no one questions it. ~ A.M. Homes

Tell me something, Mari - do you believe in reincarnation?"
Mari shakes her head. "No, I don't think so," she says.
"So you don't think there's a life to come?"
"I haven't thought much about it. But it seems to me there's no reason to believe in a life after this one."
"So once you're dead there's just nothing?"
"Basically."
"Well, I think there has to be something like reincarnation. Or maybe I should say I'm scared to think there isn't. I can't understand nothingness. I can't understand it and I can't imagine it."
"Nothingness means there's absolutely nothing, so maybe there's no need to understand it or imagine it."
"Yeah, but what if nothingness is not like that? What if it's the kind of thing that demands that you understand it or imagine it? I mean, you don't know what it's like to die, Mari. Maybe a person really has to die to understand what it's like."
"Well, yeah…," says Mari.
"I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff," Korogi says. "I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It's so much easier to just believe in reincarnation. You might be reborn as something awful, but at least you can imagine what you'd look like - a horse, say, or a snail. And even if it was something bad, you might be luckier next time. ~ Haruki Murakami

He knows not how to speak who cannot be silent; still less how to act with vigor and decision. Who hastens to the end is silent; loudness is impotence. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater

Just as you should never confuse the law with common justice, intelligence should not be confused with common sense. Some of the brightest people in the world have no idea how to cross the road. ~ Terry Wogan

She had no taste for the psychological, and nothing but scorn for the erotic. What she loved was a story which began with crime and ended with a detection - a story which kept you wondering who did it, how it was done, and when the doing was going to be laid bare to the light of day. ~ The Middle of Things ~ J.S. Fletcher

All those beings who revealed truths to me and who were no longer there, seemed to me to have lived a life from which I alone profited and as though they had died for me. It was sad for me to think that in my book, my love which was once everything to me, would be so detached from a being that various readers would apply it textually to the love they experienced for other women. But why should I be horrified by this posthumous infidelity, that this man or that should offer unknown women as the object of my sentiment, when that infidelity, that division of love between several beings began with my life and long before I began writing? I had indeed suffered successively through Gilberte, through Mme de Guermantes, through Albertine. Successively also I had forgotten them and only my love, dedicated at different times to different beings, had lasted. I had anticipated the profanation of my memories by unknown readers. I was not far from being horrified with myself as, perhaps, some nationalist party might be in whose name hostilities had been provoked and who alone had benefited from a war in which many noble victims had suffered and died without even knowing the issue of the struggle which, for my grandmother, would have been such a complete reward. And the single consolation she never knew, that at last I had set to work, was, such being the fate of the dead, that though she could not rejoice in my progress she had at least been spared consciousness of my long inactivity, of t ~ Marcel Proust

We mourn for the dead, but it's a selfish act. It may be a tragedy that so many young lives are lost to us, but it's our tragedy alone because they are at peace. ~ Jenny Penn

The central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill. ~ Fareed Zakaria

Rigor mortis was caused by a natural build-up of calcium in the muscles; living bodies used that calcium for various things, but in dead bodies it just built up and built up until the muscles grew rigid. In a day or so she'd be loose again from decay, but for now we had to knead the calcium out by hand, stroking and pressing and rubbing the flesh until it was soft and pliable. ~ Dan Wells

I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry. ~ Richard Wilbur

I wonder how it feels like
to be a tiny fish
what flitters n darts
so free.

I wonder how it feels
to be the cool, clear water
what runs
without bein chased. ~ Ann E. Burg

How characteristic of your perverse heart that longs only for what happens to be out of reach. ~ Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class. ~ John Edward Williams

My brain didn't seem to want to conform itself to the task at hand and kept wandering to stupid things like a compulsion to line up all the blue M&Ms or count how many times the word "to" appeared in the "To be or not to be" speech (fifteen, as it turns out). ~ E.E. Holmes

God doesn't need to be explained, He needs to be lauded. He needs to be proclaimed and worshipped. He needs people who are going to should out who he really is, and what He's really like. What we think about God is the single most important thing in our spiritual journey. Our image of God will drive every single part of our life and declare how we show up in the world. If we don't live a life of faith, boldness and conviction we need to examine our perception of God. We must take time to upgrade our image of God. ~ Graham Cooke

We're headed for what is called Type 1 Civilization, planetary civilization. Type 2 would be stellar civilization, like Star Trek. Type 3 Civilization would be galactic, like Star Wars. We are Type 0. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But the question is: Will we make it? Will we make the transition from Type 0 to Type 1? It's not clear. ~ Michio Kaku

To a chorus of resonant barking, the instruments proceeded to adjust themselves into tune. A billy-goat, alarmed, aroused his harem, and distantly a muffled lowing broke out.

Philippa said, 'Oh dear. It must have cost a fortune. Did Gideon ever do this to you?'

Kate thought. 'No, but I did it to him. He hadn't called to see me for a week, so I sent eight bell ringers to serenade him at cock-crow and his mother's parrot dropped dead, quoting Luther.'

'What did it say?' Philippa said. Sitting on the sill, with her long brown hair falling over her night robe, she looked, in the darkness, like the daughter who had come back from Turkey: calm and smiling and soignée.

'Music is a fair and lovely gift of God, and deserves to be extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart,' said Kate, surprised. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing ... Only when our feet learn once again how to walk in a sacred manner, and our hearts hear the real music of creation, can we bring the world back into balance. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

If you really want to help, then help others to be more present. Help others to free themselves from the past. Help others to take responsibility for themselves. Help them to see how they are creating their own suffering. Every now and then, you will encounter innocent ones who are suffering through no fault of their own, particularly animals and children. Do not hesitate! Help them. ~ Leonard Jacobson

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

When photography was invented, people had to make room in their minds for the idea that the dead would always be visible. ~ Vicki Goldberg

I'm just a black hole for stuff. No one should ever hand me anything, because I get so easily distracted. I'll be like, 'Oh, look, something shiny!' I'm glad I never learned how to drive. I would be really dangerous. ~ Florence Welch

Everyone should be very grateful radioactivity exists at all. It can kill you, yes, but without it you wouldn't have been born in the first place. On Earth, deep under your feet, our planet happens to contain many atoms that do decay, all the time. Less so now than in the past, but still, Earth's mantle is radioactive. When atoms decay there, the particles they emit bump into their neighbours and generate heat, the very heat that contributes to keeping our planet warm. Without radioactivity, there would be no seismic or volcanic activity. The surface of the Earth would have been dead cold billions of yeras ago. Life as we know it would probably not exist at all. ~ Christophe Galfard

Whether it's a relationship or what you're wearing, or how much you weigh and what you said when you didn't mean it, like - it's hard to be totally under the microscope. ~ Amy Lee

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

I want to be so famous that drag queens will dress like me in parades when I'm dead. ~ Laura Kightlinger