Dead Quotes

“I drag the body out into the snowdrifts, as far away from our shack as I can muster. I put her in a thicket of trees, where the green seems to still have a voice in the branches, and try not to think about the beasts that’ll soon be gathering. There’s no way of burying her; the ground is a solid rock of ice beneath us.

I kneel beside her and want desperately to weep. My throat tightens and my head aches. Everything hurts inside. But I have no way of releasing it. I’m locked up and hard as stone.

“I’m sorry, Mamma,” I whisper to the shell in front of me. I take her hand. It could belong to a glass doll. There’s no life there anymore.

So I gather rocks, one by one, and set them over her, trying my best to protect her from the birds, the beasts, keep her safe as much as I can now. I pile the dark stones gently on her stomach, her arms, and over her face, until she becomes one with the mountain.

I stand and study my work, feeling like the rocks are on me instead, then I leave the body for the forest and ice.”
― Rachel A. Marks, Winter Rose

“Technically, all tattoos are temporary, even permanent ones.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“With horror he perceived that, by uniting himself as he had with the dead, he had cut himself off from the living. Stripped of all earthly hope, bereft of every consolation, he was rendered as poor as mortal can possibly
be on this side of the grave.”
― Ludwig Tieck, Wake Not the Dead

“A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle.

"It's a place for burying dead folk," I say.

Her eyes widen. "A place for doing what?"

"Don't people die in space?" I ask.

"Yeah," she says. "But we burn them. We don't put them in holes." She crosses her arms around herself, mouth and forehead frowning, peering around at the graves. "How can this be sanitary?”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

“The dead are jealous, jealous, jealous and they will do anything to keep you from the living, the lucky living. They will argue with you, and distract you, and if that doesn't work, they will even let you hug them, and dance for you, and kiss you, and laugh, anything to keep you. The dead are selfish. Jealous. Lonely. Desperate. Hungry. ("The Chambered Fruit")”
― M. Rickert, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“Granny looked up at the zombie. He was - or, technically, had been - a tall, handsome man. He still was, only now he looked like someone who had walked through a room full of cobwebs.

'What's your name, dead man?' she said.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes, and stiff bodies, which, when not unnaturally shrunken, were unnaturally swollen, had always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless antipathy which was something more than the physical and spiritual repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to his unusually acute sensibilities - his keen sense of the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of reselltment. What others have respected as the dignity of death had to him no existence - was altogether unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side - a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to encounter. ("A Tough Tussle")”
― Ambrose Bierce, Ghost Stories

“The day is won [...] And yet you do not smile, boy. The living should smile, for the dead cannot.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd had a bad dream, and I stood in the dark trying to recollect it. The second I closed my eyes, I was with the dead. They did things words cannot express. They spoke madness. ("Hanka")”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“And won’t he grow up to be the healthiest of young men, all because she kept him safe? Ready for the world. Ready to one day conquer it. To travel. Get on a train. Go to work. Get blown out of her life.
Maybe she should be having that glass of wine and cigarette after all.”
― Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son

“The old world told men merely about to live and to die.
Today men think about defeating death and resurrection.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Sometimes I wait at the bottom of those dark stairs, I sit at the bottom of the stairs, I wait beyond the bottom of the stairs and listen to the sounds my wife and children make as they sleep, the sounds our animals make as they step carefully through our dreams and out the other side to polished floor and cold window. Sometimes I wait so long I become unsure if I am asleep, or awake, or dead.”
― Steve Rasnic Tem, The Man on the Ceiling

“Here it is necessary briefly to consider the question of the cult of ancestors before venturing farther. The spirits of the departed are believed to be possessed of supernatural powers which they did not enjoy in the flesh. They may also be dissatisfied or malignant in consequence of being suddenly deprived of life, and if they are neglected by the living, are apt to be revengeful. Therefore they must be cajoled and propitiated. Fear of beings belonging to a mysterious state or sphere of which he knew nothing continually haunted and terrified primitive man and induced in him what is known as" the dread of the sacred." It was every man's personal duty to attend to the demands or requirements of his deceased ancestors. At first he would succour his own immediate forebears with food and gifts; but it must have been borne in upon him that when his parents joined the great majority, the care of the spirits of their parents likewise devolved upon him... and, by degrees, he might even come to regard himself as responsible for the well-being of a line of spirit ancestors of quite formidable genealogy. These, through his neglect, might starve in their tombs; or, alternatively, they might crave his company. Because of vengeance or loneliness they might send disease upon him, for the savage almost invariably believes illness to be brought about by the action of jealous or neglected ancestors. The loneliness of the spirit-world is the dead man's greatest excuse for desiring the company of his descendants.”
― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

“You cannot do anything good for a dead man! Whatever goodness you want to do for him, do it when he is alive!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“One dead body required two men either to bury it or to transport it to the rear. A wounded soldier, on the other hand, immobilized five men for an indeterminate amount of time; and who knew whether it was even worth the effort.”
― STEPHANE AUDEGUY, The Theory of Clouds

“Before Elijah could raise a nation from the dead, he raised just one dead child.”
― Lou Engle

“Does it help?” he asks. “The e-mailing.”
She nods. “A tiny bit. It’s strange. You’re writing a letter to someone who’s never going to read it, so it kind of frees you up a bit.”
― Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son

“Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics.”
― Shannon Celebi, 1:32 P.M.

“She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you could not still be dating someone you believe had an autopsy, so it was not really cheating.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Danse Macabre (Night's Dream, #2)

“Bravery is the dead man’s virtue.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“There is nothing so actively alive as the dead.”
― Jessie Douglas Kerruish, The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension

“Man is better off without the confusion and fear of psychic experience and his progress will be faster.' If telepathy ever becomes a possibility he was not sure it would be a good thing, '...for it may put us back in contact with the spirits of the dead and progress does not lie in that direction.”
― H.R. Wakefield

“It is fatally easy, under the conditions of the modern world, for a writer of genius to conceive of himself as a Messiah. Other writers, indeed, may have had profound insights before him; but we readily believe that everything is relative to its period of society, and that these insights have now lost their validity; a new generation is a new world, so there is always a chance, if not of delivering a wholly new gospel, of delivering one as good as new. Or the messiahship may take the form of revealing for the first time the gospel of some dead sage, which no one has understood before; which owing to the backward and confused state of men's minds has lain unknown to this very moment; or it may even go back to the lost Atlantis and the ineffable wisdom of primitive peoples. A writer who is fired with such a conviction is likely to have some devoted disciples; but for posterity he is liable to become, what he will be for the majority of his contemporaries, merely one among many entertainers. And the pity is that the man may have had something to say of the greatest importance: but to announce, as your own discovery, some truth long known to mankind, is to secure immediate attention at the price of ultimate neglect.”
― T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods : A Primer of Modern Heresy

“The ghost bird had found his ghost, on an inexplicable pile of other ghosts.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The whispers of the dead echo through time, seeking justice and closure.”
― Sharyn McCrumb, The Ballad of Frankie Silver

“in the sweet green cold London
spring
I watch a tall grey heron
stomping down its reed nest
that's sprouting everywhere
like garden-sheared hair

and all my living
and all my dead
run up my arms
like squirrels.”
― Dorothy Porter

“Explaining their point of view seemed to be a universal thing amongst the dead.”
― Byrd Nash, Ghost Talker

“Be careful what you wish for, especially during the season of the dead.”
― Byrd Nash, Delicious Death

“A dead end is a lesson: don't be dead.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“The graveyards of our lives are filled with things that should have never died because we gave birth to an arrogance that should have never lived.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough