Justice For The Dead Quotes

For me, the past is dead. Can't go back. ~ Jonathan Ames

There's no reason to sound so relieved, Drago,' said Marlise. 'You're the only person here who's ever collided with a portal.'
There was a sound of laughter, and Drago groaned. 'My lateral thrusters were out, and I couldn't exactly take is slowly given I'd got a whole pack of giant flying lizards chasing me.'
'That's another thing,' said Marlise. 'You were supposed to bring back a specimen for the scientists, but the idea was that it would be dead. ~ Janet Edwards

You have the lovers,
they are nameless, their histories only for each other,
and you have the room, the bed, and the windows.
Pretend it is a ritual.
Unfurl the bed, bury the lovers, blacken the windows,
let them live in that house for a generation or two.
No one dares disturb them.
Visitors in the corridor tip-toe past the long closed door,
they listen for sounds, for a moan, for a song:
nothing is heard, not even breathing.
You know they are not dead,
you can feel the presence of their intense love.
Your children grow up, they leave you,
they have become soldiers and riders.
Your mate dies after a life of service.
Who knows you? Who remembers you?
But in your house a ritual is in progress:
It is not finished: it needs more people.
One day the door is opened to the lover's chamber.
The room has become a dense garden,
full of colours, smells, sounds you have never known.
The bed is smooth as a wafer of sunlight,
in the midst of the garden it stands alone.
In the bed the lovers, slowly and deliberately and silently,
perform the act of love.
Their eyes are closed,
as tightly as if heavy coins of flesh lay on them.
Their lips are bruised with new and old bruises.
Her hair and his beard are hopelessly tangled.
When he puts his mouth against her shoulder
she is uncertain whether her shoulder
has given or received the kiss.
~ Leonard Cohen

If I had any doubts at all about the justice of my dislike for Shakespeare, that doubt vanished completely. What a crude, immoral,vulgar, and senseless work Hamlet is. The whole thing is based on pagan vengeance; the only aim is to gather together as many effects as possible; there is no rhyme or reason about it. ~ Leo Tolstoy

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other. Age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and their vanities. Those they love are taken from them and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. The burden of pain, care, misery, grows heavier year by year. At length ambition is dead; pride is dead; vanity is dead; longing for release is in their place. It comes at last - the only unpoisoned gift ever had for them - and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they have existed – a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever. Then another myriad takes their place and copies all they did and goes along the same profitless road and vanishes as they vanished - to make room for another and another and a million other myriads to follow the same arid path through the same desert and accomplish what the first myriad and all the myriads that came after it accomplished - nothing! ~ Mark Twain

But to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one's innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there's no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame. ~ Anna Kavan

Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead. ~ Tom Perrotta

Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hears? On the face of it, it seemed unlikely that one Leader could force a million Englishmen against their will. If, for instance, Mordred had been anxious to make the English wear petticoats, or stand on their heads, they would surely not have joined his party -- however clever or persuasive or deceitful or even terrible his inducements? A leader was surely forced to offer something which appealed to those he led? He might give the impetus to the falling building, but surely it had to be toppling on its own account before it fell? If this were true, then wars were not calamities into which amiable innocents were led by evil men.They were national movements, deeper, more subtle in origin. And, indeed, it did not feel to him as if he or Mordred had led their country to its misery. If it was so easy to lead one's country in various directions, as if she was a pig on a string, why had he failed to lead her into chivalry, into justice, and into peace? He had been trying.
Then again -- this was the second circle -- it was like the Inferno -- if neither he nor Mordred had really set the misery in motion, who had been the cause? How did the fact of war begin in general? For any one war seemed so rooted in its antecedents. Mordred went back to Morgause, Morgause to Uther Pendragon, Uther to his ancestors. It seemed as if Cain had slain Abel, seizin ~ T.H. White

Stigma takes many forms, comes from all directions, is sometimes blatantly overt, but can also be remarkably subtle. It is the cruel comment, the unkind smirk, the extrusion from the group, the lost job opportunity, the rejected marriage proposal, the ineligibility for life insurance, the inability to adopt a child or pilot a plane.

But it is also the reduced expectation, the helping hand when none is needed or wanted, the solicitous sympathy that one cannot really be expected to measure up.

And the secondary psychological and practical harms of having a mental disorder come only partly from how others see you. A great deal of the trouble comes from the change in how you see yourself: the sense of being damaged goods, feeling not normal or worthy, not a full fledged member of the group.

It is bad enough that stigma is so often associated with having a mental disorder, but the stigma that comes from being mislabeled with a fake diagnosis is a dead loss with absolutely no redeeming features. ~ Allen Frances

Sex gets people killed, put in jail, beaten up, bankrupted, and disgraced, to say nothing of ruined - personally, politically, and professionally. Looking for sex can lead to misfortune, and if you get lucky and find it, it can leave you maimed, infected, or dead. Other than that, it's swell: the great American pastime ... You probably won't see it on a bumper sticker, but sex kills. ~ Edna Buchanan

Liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum. ~ William Shakespeare

There is a quiet room inside of me.
Where I kept the thought of you so alive.
In all of my phases that's the only place where my soul would rather be.
And that's where I bring my dead roses back to life.
In that room, there is nothing to hear
But a love song of free birds.
In that room there is nothing to feel
But their flipping wings flying through my chest.
For this room has always been the peace that never fails to end my wars.
And it will always be the reason why I've never looked for home in others, as long as the warmest and safest home is there ;
Inside of me …. ~ Samiha Totanji

The sea of excited people, the flood of colored lights, and the unending stream of cars were proof that the days of the Holocaust were now part of the history books. I awakened from my horrible memories and almost agreed with the opinion voiced by many that the ghetto was a dead issue and the whole period surrounding it too far-fetched, too cruelly-sadistic, to be believable today, assuming it really existed.... The reign of man-eating furnaces is hard for a reasonable mind to grasp, even that of someone who was a victim himself. ~ Joseph Bau

Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate and dazed in our demi-tomb. From time to time, one of us would look over the parapet to stare across the dusty plain into the east, from which death might bear down on us at any moment. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else, that time exists, and hope, and sentiments other than anguish; that friendship can be more than ephemeral, that love can sometimes occur, that the earth can be productive, and used for something other than burying the dead. ~ Guy Sajer

Stay in the car Nick"
"okay."
Ash gets out abd goes to look at the dead body.
"For an immortal being with 11,000 years under his belt Ash sure is stupid." Nick gets out and sees the blood.
"That's a lot of blood." Nick's book starts sending him an alert. "What Lassie? You going to tell Timmy about the well?" pulls out book, and opens it. words start to appear.
LOOK AND YOU
WILL SEE THAT
WHICH WAS CAN
NEVER BE.
WHEN THEY
SEEK A BOY
YOUR AGE ...
... RUN, YOU
FLIPPIN
MORON, RUN!
"I'm not gonna argue with my book on that. The safest place is with Ash. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

For the dead travel fast. ~ Bram Stoker

I tell young people to prepare themselves as best they can for a world that grows more challenging every day-get the best education they can, and couple that education with real-life experience in social justice work. ~ Julian Bond

You wander through this city, and wonder if anything you do will make up for the horror that keeps the world turning. To live, you rip your own heart from your chest and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything you ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. You throw yourself into games to mark the time. And if you yearn for something different: what would you change? Would you bring back the blood, the dying cries, the sucking chest wounds? The constant war? So we're caught between two poles of hypocrisy. We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive. ~ Max Gladstone

The marquess held the weapon out, as formally as if he were passing a sword.
Soberly, Ned accepted it. He placed the sacrificial citrus on the table in front of him, and then with one careful
incision, eviscerated it. He speared deep into its heart, his
hands steady, and then cut it to pieces. Jenny allotted herself one short moment of wistful sorrow for her afterdinner treat gone awry as the juice ran everywhere.
"Enough." She reached out and covered his hand midstab.
"It's dead now," she explained gravely.
He pulled his hand away and nodded. Lord Blakely took back his knife and cleaned it with a handkerchief.
Jenny studied the corpse. It was orange. It was pulpy. It
was going to be a mess to clean up. Most importantly, it gave her an excuse to sit and think of something mystical to say - the only reason for this exercise, really. Lord Blakely
demanded particulars. But in Jenny's profession, specifics were the enemy. ~ Courtney Milan

The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are ... There's a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive ... ~ Flannery O'Connor

And for almost four hours they sat at the opposite ends of the couch, the portable phonograph on the coffee table before them, their faces lit with silent and sorrowful fascination, listening as the music of a dead world filled the summer night. ~ Stephen King

You assume far too readily that man is a paragon of justice, forgetting, apparently, that he has a long and savage history. He has killed other animals not only for meat but for pleasure; he has enslaved his neighbors, murdered his opponents, and obtained the most unholy sadistical joy from the agony of others. It is not impossible that we shall, in the course of our travels, meet other intelligent creatures far more worthy than man to rule the universe. ~ A.E. Van Vogt

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

When our boulevards are lined with an infinity of bad eating houses filled with dead-faced people placed like mute beasts in their stalls; today, when one out of every three marriages ends in divorce ... It seems incredible that normal human beings not only tolerate the average American restaurant food, but actually prefer it to eating at home. The only possible explanation for such deliberate mass-poisoning, a kind of suicide of the spirit as well as the body, is that meals in the intimacy of a family dining-room or kitchen are unbearable. ~ Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

Atticus "What's this religion going to be called?"
Oberon "Poochism"
A:"and the name of this holy writ I will be typing for you?"
O:"The dead flea scrolls: A Sirius Prophecy. ~ Kevin Hearne

And don't look for anything out of the law around here," she said. "The Cowgills and the Leapers is kin to the sheriff. No justice in these parts. It's every man for hisself."
"But as the saying goes, if you can't get justice," Mrs. Dowdel remarked, "get even. ~ Richard Peck

Yes, bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn't something a special ops team can fix. ~ Radley Balko

I do three weeks at the Hall of Justice Jail. It's a potent crime primer. I'm the geek that all the pro thugs disdain. I observe them up close. It's the '60s. It's social-grievance-as-justification-for-bad-actions time. My cellmates have sadness raps down. I gain a notch on my crime-as-continuing-circumstance notion. Crime is large-scale individual moral default.

That means you, motherfucker. ~ James Ellroy

Since ancient times, the left side has stood for the side of the unconscious or the unknown; the right side, by contrast, has represented the side of consciousness or wakefulness. Through the late twentieth century, the movement of the Left limited themselves to a materialist understanding of reality- exemplified by Marxism- demanding social justice and economic equality but not the restoration of intuition and the recognition of the hidden, qualitative dimensions of being suppressed by the mental-rational consciousness, narrowly focused on the quantifiable. ~ Jean Gebser

Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens - leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. ~ George W. Bush

I want to stay," and then, more weakly, "Need some more sun."
A fly from a batch of seaweed lands on a white, bony thigh. She doesn't slap at it. It doesn't go away.
"But there's no sun, dude." I tell her.
I start to walk away. So what, I mutter under my breath. When she wants to come in, she will. Imagine a blind person dreaming. I head back up toward the house. Wonder if Griffin will stick around, if Mona made reservations for dinner, if Spin will call back. "I know what the word dead means," I whisper to myself as softly as I can because it sounds like an omen. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

The light that illumines it, and reveals to a man the cathedral of his soul, can be of many strengths – from a candle to a sun – but it burns on one fuel only: his integrity. The vision contains an element of eternity that has nothing to do with time, but everything to do with the width and breadth of his life. It is measurable, but indivisible. Betrayed, it will avenge itself. The action would contradict both it and a man's ineradicable knowledge of it, leaving him, should he survive the cataclysm, a mechanical, insensate manqué, drained of all future capacity for the sublime and earthly joy. Betrayed, it will become his worst nemesis, and he the impotent enemy of the implacable justice of its memory. Animate, it can make him maddeningly intolerant and insufferably imperial, together contemptuous of lesser souls and indifferent to them. It could cause him to say to others, should he be provoked to speak to them in his thoughts: You think in terms of nooks and crannies, of niches and pigeonholes, of ruffles and fringes; I think in terms of vistas and frescoes, of oceans and continents, peopled by gods, heroes, and myself. ~ Edward Cline

Sarah put the man and the other dead children out of her head. Later, perhaps, she would watch Lockie out in the garden and cry for all the mothers who would not see their children again. Later she would weep for the sadness of their loss and the joy of her own luck, but now she only had eyes for her boy, her little man, her Lockie. She ran her hands over his body, lifted his shirt a little and caught sight of a yellowing bruise. The air caught in her throat.
'Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,' she whispered.
Someone had hit him. She wanted to undress him right then to see the damage but Lockie was so fast asleep. She knew he wasn't just sleeping because he was tired. He had gone to the same place she had been in for months. She and Lockie looked alike now. The angles on his face matched hers and in a way she was glad.
She had suffered along with him.
And now here he was. ~ Nicole Trope