The Dead Tossed Waves Quotes

I can't compare the lives I could have lived. One would have been comfort and security. But the other ... " She sighs. "It was the most love and the most pain and the most wonder I could have ever known. ~ Carrie Ryan

They're endless, stretching beyond the horizon and spreading around me like forever. They heave and moan, frothing over each other, cresting and falling. The pure depth and vastness of it all beyond comprehension, my eyes unable to focus on any individual. Instead I'm drowned in their need. They ripple and swell, the bodies of the Mudo, like the ocean. Like the dead-tossed waves. ~ Carrie Ryan

How it feels to me, and I guess to you as well, is that the present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead. ~ Richard Dawkins

The other sources, even when they mention Hel, rarely describe it. But when they do, it's cast in neutral or even positive terms. For example, the mention that the land of the dead is "green and beautiful" in Ibn Fadlan's account is mirrored in a passage from Saxo (The medieval Danish historian, as you likely recall). In Saxo's telling of the story of Hadding, the hero travels to the "Underworld" and finds a "fair land where green herbs grow when it is winter on earth." His companion even beheads a rooster just outside of that land and flings its carcass over the wall, at which point the bird cries out and comes back to life - a feat which is highly reminiscent of another detail from Ibn Fadlan, namely the beheading of a rooster and a hen whose bodies are then tossed into the dead man's boat shortly before it's set aflame. In both cases, the emphasis is on abundant life in the world of the dead, even when death and absence prevail on earth. ~ Daniel McCoy

Now here is an oddity. A question for the zombie philosophers. What does it mean that my past is a fog but my present is brilliant, bursting with sound and color? Since I became Dead I've recorded new memories with the fidelity of an old cassette deck, faint and muffled and ultimately forgettable. But I can recall every hour of the last few days in vivid detail, and the thought of losing a single one horrifies me. Where am I getting this focus? This clarity? I can trace a solid line from the moment I met Julie all the way to now, lying next to her in this sepulchral bedroom, and despite the millions of past moments I've lost or tossed away like highway trash, I know with a lockjawed certainty I'll remember this one for the rest of my life. ~ Isaac Marion

Russkie, promise me a simple thing?" Out of the blue when they had finished, after a mouthful from the mug. Dan seemed relaxed, leaning on his side. Resting back, savoring the taste, Vadim turned his head to look at Dan. Oh, that body. The effect it had on him, all the time, even when Dan wasn't there. Twelve months. "Promise what?"
Sometimes, that kind of thing was about letters. Tell my girl I love her. Tell my mother I didn't suffer. Almost painful. Letters. Words that would hurt worse than the killing bullet.
"Simple." Dan nodded, "if I'm unlucky, and if you find my body, will you bury it? Some rocks would do, I can't stand the thought of carrion's. As if that mattered, eh? I'd be fucking dead." Dan shrugged, tossed a grin towards the other, made light of an entirely far too heavy situation. He took the bottle once more, washing down the taste of death and decay, chasing away unbidden images.
Vadim felt a shudder race over his skin. The thought of death chilled him to the bone, like a premonition. For a moment he saw himself stagger through enemy territory, looking for something that had been Dan. Minefields, snipers, fucking Hind hellfire. He might be able to track him. He might be able to guess where he had gone, where he had fallen. He had found the occasional pilot. But he had had help. Finding a dead man in a country full of dead people was more of a challenge.
"I'll send you home," he murmured. Stay alive, he thought. Stay alive like you are now. ~ Marquesate

The frightened soul ran into the wine cellar with the steel door. I'm safe, Calloway thought, but he was dead wrong. Railrunner's claws slashed through the steel door. They cut through the metal like butter. He then began to pull the door off its hinges.
Suddenly a smoke bomb fell to the floor, making the place vaporous, but Railrunner's eyes could see through it. He discovered the flashing lights of squad cars. His eyes narrowed and he growled low in his throat.
"Come on out with your hands up!" an officer yelled.
Railrunner walked upright towards the entrance. He then pushed the doors off their hinges and stood in the line of fire.
"It's a - roller coaster?" One of the police said baffled, the gun shaking in his hand.
Railrunner crossly walked up to the police. They began to fire, their bullets simply bouncing off of him. He then grabbed the front bumper of the cruiser, and tossed it like a toy. It smashed into another car. Railrunner flung an officer out of his way and roared in sheer amusement. Within a blink of an eye he obliterated the small police force. ~ Miranda Leek

What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness. ~ Haruki Murakami

By the time she was six, even her own parents were dead. God must have seemed less likely than chance, goodness less likely than evil--so Gertie knocked on wood and crossed fingers, tossed coins into fountains and rice over shoulders. When she prayed, she bargained. ~ Chloe Benjamin

He spiked the dirt, twisted out the deformed rose, tossed it aside. His palms sweated.
'Sorry,' Persephone suggested.
'Pardon?'
She murmured, 'You should say sorry when you kill something.'
It took him a moment to realize she meant the rose. 'It was dying anyway.'
'Dying and dead are different words.'
Shamed, Adam muttered an apology ... ~ Maggie Stiefvater

And stop grabbing my bra."
"Huh?" Matthias looked down at the lingerie in his hands. His eyes bugged.
"Ahhh!" He tossed it in the air and vigorously wiped his palms. Blake caught the under garment. "Oh, yeah."
"Blake!" we all yelled. "Give it back!" Ayden reached for it, but at the last minute pushed a hand through his hair and looked away.
"To Aurora." Tristan stared at the floor. Logan had his shirt pulled up to his forehead. Matthias kept wiping his hands on his jeans.
A & E Kirk (2014-05-26). Drop Dead Demons: The Divinicus Nex Chronicles: Book 2 (Divinicus Nex Chronicles series) (p. 472). A&E Kirk. Kindle Edition. ~ A&E Kirk

Swear to God, you come near us and–"
"Like this?" The biker sidestepped a slash from the hockey stick, grabbed it on the way, and yanked it out of Eve's hands. He tossed it over his shoulder to land on the floor with a clatter. "This near enough? Whatcha gonna do, doll girl?"
Claire hid her eyes as the biker reached out for Eve with one tattooed hand.
"No," Eve said breathlessly. "I'm going to let my boyfriend beat the crap out of you."
There was a dull thunk of wood meeting flesh, and a howl. Then another, harder thunk, and a crash as a body hit the floor.
The biker was down. Claire stared at him in disbelief, then looked past him, to the figure standing there with the field hockey stick in both hands.
Michael Glass. Back from the dead, again, a gorgeous blond avenging angel, breathing hard. ~ Rachel Caine

Nico sat forward. "I communed with the dead last night." He just tossed that line out there, like he was saying he got a text from a buddy. ~ Rick Riordan

Get off your horse, Jack."
"Why don't you just ride outta here, missy, and I'll forget this ever happened."
Willow's voice trembled with fury. "Get off your horse," she repeated. "Slow and easy."
Still grinning his contempt, he did as he asked.
"That's good. Now, real slow like, take your gunbelt off and toss it my way."
"Like hell!" A shot rang out and nicked a chunk of leather from his boot. Cursing, he unbuckled his gun and tossed it at her mare's feet.
"Now,strip them britches off, underwear, too," she ordered.
"You little shi-" Bang! Jack's hat whizzed off his head. He dropped his pants in a puddle over his boots, trying his best to shelter his privates from her view.
"My,my,Jack." Willow laughed humorlessly. "Is that puny thing you're trying to hide the same thing you were threatening me with?"
If looks could kill, Willow would have been dead and buried ten times over, then and there.
"Take them confounded boots off so's you can get your pants clear off," she ordered in mock exasperation.
He wheeled around, gaining a modicum of privacy while he complied.
"You're puny all over, Jack. You got the boniest bee-hind I ever did see. You sure you ain't picked up a worm somewheres?"
"You're gonna pay for this,you little slut!"
"Shut your filthy mouth and pick them pants off the ground and toss 'em over here at my horse's feet. Then you can put your boots back on."
He gave the pants a toss, put his boots ~ Charlotte McPherren

I've got the camera. You got the film?"

Benny shook the baggie until the canisters fell out. "I got the film."

I tossed my head over at Jamie. "What've you got?"

"Passion. Charm. Talent. And an irrepressible desire to charge around a battlefield while I'm being pursued by the dead."

"Okay," I agreed. "If that's all you've got, it'll have to do. ~ Cherie Priest

The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land - all things born of the soul that can only be felt. ~ Anthony De Sa

Cotillion tossed the apple aside, then reached out to grasp Kalam's upper arm. 'Step away and leave the rest to me.'

'Hold on a moment. Quick Ben's spells were dispelled – that's how I ended up stuck here - '

'Probably because he's unconscious.'

'He is?'

'Or dead. We should confirm things either way, yes?'

You sanctimonious blood-lapping sweat-sucking -

'Risky,' Cotillion cut in, 'making your cursing sound like praying. ~ Steven Erikson

Why are you making that face, Fern?" Bailey asked.
"What face?"
"That face that looks like you can't figure something out. Your eyebrows are pushed down and your forehead is wrinkled. And you're frowning."
Fern smoothed out her face, realizing she was doing exactly what Bailey said she was doing. "I was thinking about a story I've been writing. I can't figure out how to end it. What do you think this face means?" Fern gave herself an underbite and crossed her eyes.
"You look like a brain-dead cartoon character," Bailey answered, snickering.
"What about this one?" Fern pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows while wincing.
"You're eating something super sour!" Bailey cried. "Let me try one." Bailey thought for a minute and then he made his mouth go slack and opened his eyes as wide as they could go. His tongue lolled out the side of his mouth like a big dog.
"You're looking at something delicious," Fern guessed.
"Be more specific," Bailey said and made the face once more.
"Hmm. You're looking at a huge ice cream sundae," Fern tried again. Bailey pulled his tongue back into his mouth and grinned cheekily.
"Nope. That's the face you make every time you see Ambrose Young."
Fern swatted Bailey with the cheap stuffed bear she'd won at the school carnival in fourth grade. The arm flew off and ratty stuffing flew in all directions. Fern tossed it aside.
"Oh yeah? What about you? This is the face you make whenever Rita comes ~ Amy Harmon

You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jail house. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money. ~ Raymond Chandler

If we were going to determine what was broken in the radios, we needed a power source. With no electricity, this meant batteries. [ ... ] we'd walk to the trading center and look for used cells that had been tossed in the waste bins. [ ... ]
First we'd test the battery to see if any juice was left in it. We'd attach two wires to the positive and negative ends and connect them to a torch bulb. The brighter the bulb, the stronger the battery. Next we'd flatten the Shake Shake carton and roll it into a tube, then stack the batteries inside, making sure the positives and negatives faced in the same direction. Then we'd run wires from each end of the stack to the positive and negative heads inside the radio, where the batteries normally go. Together, this stack of dead batteries usually contained enough juice to power a radio. ~ William Kamkwamba

Gard tossed his braids over his shoulder with a sniff. 'Somebody's feeling masterful. Do I not get a choice in the matter?'
'Certainly,' Tarn agreed. 'You may choose to come with us, or you may choose to stay here, alone and naked, and wait for the dead to claw themselves out of the sand to feast on your flesh. I would advise the former, but you are a free man.' ~ Amy Rae Durreson

[Adapted and condensed Valedictorian speech:]

I'm going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life, not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus - though I'm sure they're helpful - but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish. People make fun of the goldfish. People don't think twice about swallowing it. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of '42, appears in the Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen-minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. In his defense, though, I don't think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us. If you live like a goldfish, you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts - the guppy, the neon tetra - go belly-up at the first sign of trouble. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America - a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice - luckily she'd done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn't quite come down fully on the fish. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. It went on to live another forty-seven years. They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. Bowls that haven't seen soap in a year. And they don't die from neglect, not immediately. They hold on for thre ~ Marisha Pessl

The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambition, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménage à trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

It was an unusual sunset. Having sat behind opaque drapery all day, I had not realized that a storm was pushing in and that much of the sky was the precise shade of old suits of armor one finds in museums. At the same time, patches of brilliance engaged in a territorial dispute with the oncoming onyx of the storm. Light and darkness mingled in strange ways both above and below. Shadows and sunshine washed together, streaking the landscape with an unearthly study of glare and gloom. Bright clouds and black folded into each other in a no-man's land of the sky. The autumn trees took on the appearance of sculptures formed in a dream, their leaden-colored trunks and branches and iron-red leaves all locked in an infinite and unliving moment, unnaturally timeless. The gray lake slowly tossed and tumbled in a dead sleep, nudging unconsciously against its breakwall of numb stone. A scene of contradiction and ambivalence, a tragicomedic haze over all. A land of perfect twilight. ~ Thomas Ligotti

I love McNab."
Even as she turned toward Peabody, Eve could feel the muscle under her right eye vibrating toward a twitch. "Oh man. Do you have to do this?"
"Yeah. I love McNab," Peabody repeated. "It took me a while to realize it, or get there, however it works. But he's the one. If you were to drop down dead, and Roarke decided I could comfort him with wild
sex I probably wouldn't do it. Probably. But even if I did, I'd still love McNab."
"At least I'm dead in your sexual fantasy."
"It's only fair. I wouldn't cheat on my partner. So I probably wouldn't have sex with Roarke, should the opportunity arise, unless both you and McNab were killed in a freak accident."
"Thanks, Peabody. I feel a lot better now."
'And we'd probably wait a decent interval. Like two weeks. If we could control ourselves."
"It just gets better and better," Eve remarked.
"In a way, we'd really be celebrating your lives, and our love for you both."
"Maybe you're the ones who die in a freak accident," Eve tossed back. "Then me and McNab... No, Jesus. No." She visibly shuddered. "I don't love you that much."
"Aw, that's not very nice. Too bad for you, because McNab's an airjack in the sack."
"Shut up now. Save yourself. ~ J.D. Robb

Who has not raised a tombstone, here and there, over buried hopes and dead joys, on the road of life? Like the scars of the heart, they are not to be obliterated. ~ Ninon De L'Enclos

When Salter was fifty-five, his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Allan, died in an electrical accident. She was in the shower in a cabin next door to his in Aspen. He walked in and found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. He carried her dead body in his arms. He took her outside and tried to resuscitate her, somehow thinking she was drowning. We do not talk about this. He says only, There was the wreckage of that. ~ Katie Roiphe

Though you may never have attended a funeral, two of the world's humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we're at fourteen. The dead space this process out nicely so that the living hardly even notice they're undergoing the transformation. Unless ~ Caitlin Doughty

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, and be the one who ended up in that accident, completely dead ... but you know what? It wouldn't change anything. All I can do now that they're dead is to go through the actions of living without really living, and hope it improves someday. ~ Rebecca McNutt

The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth ~ William Shakespeare

Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or the government.

Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators.

Hope does not mean that the nation's ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope.

Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope.

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something.

Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope does not believe in force. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all.

Hope sees in our enemy our own face.

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with ~ Chris Hedges

Firestar and Dustpelt were dead; Graystripe and Sandstorm were the last remaining cats of their generation. ~ Erin Hunter

Coco?" I whispered, standing still, hardly able to believe it. "Oh - Coco?" "It is impossible to imagine," a voice behind seemed to be saying from a great distance away, "how the dog could have reached this spot. For three days he has been immovable in his kennel." I dropped on my knees, and took his paw in my hand. He gave the faintest wag of his tail, and tried to raise his head; but it fell back again, and he could only look at me. For an instant, for the briefest instant, we looked at each other, and while we looked his eyes glazed. "Coco - I've come back. Darling - I'll never leave you any more - - " I don't know why I said these things. I knew he was dead, and that no calls, no lamentations, no love could ever reach him again. Sliding down on to the stone flags beside him, I laid my head on his and wept in an agony of bitter grief. Now indeed I was left alone in the world. Even my dog was gone. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

On September 11, it was government that failed. Law enforcement agencies didn't detect the plot. The FBI had reports that said young men on the terrorist watch list were going from flight school to flight school, trying to find an instructor who would teach them how to fly a commercial jet. But the FBI never acted on it. The INS let the hijackers in. Three of them had expired visas. Months after the attack, the government issued visas to two dead hijackers.
The solution to such government incompetence is to give the government more power?
Congress could have done what Amsterdam, Belfast, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Paris, and Rome did: set tough standards and let private companies compete to meet them. Many of those cities switched to private companies because they realized government-run security wasn't working very well. Private-sector competition keeps the screeners alert because the airport can fire them. No one can fire the government; that's a reason government agencies gradually deteriorate. There's no competition. ~ John Stossel

But in the end, he's just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant. ~ Wes Anderson

They prised open the door in the morning. The beatific expression on his face was exactly what one would find in a temple deity or the just dead - an unsmiling smile. The absurdity and humour was there if one could just see it, the question and answer staring one in the face ~ Srividya Srinivasan

I think I probably have the philosophy of a poor man. You know, like maybe I'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes. ~ John Cassavetes

Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

When the time travel is eventually doable technologically,
yesterday was dead a man who is going to be born tomorrow. ~ Toba Beta

It had been no more than three minutes since she had awakened, laughing quietly, from her dream. Now the quiet laughter was over, and Polly MacIver was dead. ~ John Saul, Second Child

Ginny Davis - poor, dead Ginny - had lent Connie a set of yoga DVDs that looked like they'd come from the ancient 1990s. ~ Barry Lyga

With this pen I take in hand my selves
and with these dead disciples I will grapple.
Though rain curses the window
let the poem be made. ~ Anne Sexton

I have a novel that I can write. It's about three soldiers from Somalia. Some babies have been disappearing up on 144th Street, and I speculate later on what happened to them and how they might have been got back. These guys are dead, all three, and they have a chance in the afterlife to do something they should have done when they were alive. ~ Gil Scott-Heron

I see God in the face of children. If there were no children on this Earth, if somebody announced that all kids are dead, I would jump off the balcony immediately. I'm done. ~ Michael Jackson

Unless it's a dead-straight short putt, you should focus on a spot somewhere along the line you want to roll the ball on. ~ Ernie Els

Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul. ~ Parker J. Palmer

There it sat, perfect as a fresh-laid egg on the dead sea bottom, the only nucleus of light and warmth in hundreds of miles of lonely wasteland. It was like a heart beating alone in a great dark body. He felt almost sorrowful with pride, gazing at it with wet eyes. ~ Ray Bradbury