The Dead Quotes

“The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the dead. They called them both the 'Silent People'; and the Milky Way they thought was the path along which the dead were carried to Fairyland.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“...how mean and foolish are the living, with their never-ending terrors and curiosities, the puny effort of their lives, when faced with the quiet, kingly dead.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“Stop a minute, Ambrose!" interrupted Master Nathaniel. "I've got a sudden silly whim that we should take an oath I must have read when I was a youngster in some old book... the words have suddenly come back to me. They go like this: We (and then we say our own names), Nathaniel Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle, swear by the Living and the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by Memories and Hopes, that if a Vision comes begging at our door we will take it in and warm it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser than the foolish nor more cunning than the simple, and that we will remember that he who rides the Wind needs must go where his Steed carries him.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Life's so much simpler when you're dead!”
― Stewart Stafford

“The angel is nothing without the demon. Opposite sides of the same coin. The coins they lay on the eyes and mouths of the dead.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Can anything be more ridiculous than one dead person mourning for another?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“are they nothing at all, the cries of men?
does nothing happen in time but time passing?

-nothing happens, only the flickering eyelid
of the great sun, hardly a movement, nothing,
the unredeemable boundaries of time,
the dead are all pinned down by their own dying,
they cannot die again of another death,
they are untouchable, locked in their gestures,
and since their solitude and since their dying
this only they can do: stare sightless at us,
their death is simply the statue of their life,
perpetual being and nothingness without end,
for every moment is nothing without end,
a king of fantasy regulates your pulse
and your last gesture carves an impassive mask
and lays that sculpture over your mobile face:
we are the monument raised to an alien
life, a life unlived, not lively, hardly ours.”
― Octavio Paz, Selected Poems

“He can't take it all in, dazed
from early death. But their looking
flashes an owl from behind the rim of the crown. And
brushing downwards slowly along the great cheek,
the one of ripest roundness,
the bird limns into the dead youth's new
hearing, across a double
open page, the indescribable contour.

And, higher, the stars.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“To say yes is to die
A lot or a little. The dead wear capably their wry

Enameled emblems. They smell.
But that and that they do not altogether yell is all that we know well.

It is brave to be involved,
To be not fearful to be unresolved.

Her new wish was to smile
When answers took no airships, walked a while.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks

“We abandon the dead. We abandon them.”
― Joseph Fasano, Inheritance

“Jerusalem, the only city in the world
where the right to vote is granted even to the dead.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day.”
- The Dead”
― James Joyce, The Dead and Other Stories from Dubliners

“There are countless ways to put the living in the service of the dying and the dead, to pull a veil over the feebleness of every effort. It is easy to shield ourselves, she [Hirut] thinks as she watches the women continue to pray, from a fact that has always been so: that the dead are stronger. That they know no physical boundaries. They reside in the corners of every memory and rise up, again and again, to resist all our efforts to leave them behind and let them rest.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“I, too, have been in the underworld, even as Odysseus, and I shall often be there again. Not sheep alone have I sacrificed that I might be able to converse with a few dead souls, but I have not spared my own blood. Four pairs did not reject my sacrifices: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With them I must come to terms when I have long wandered alone. I will let them agree and disagree with me, and listen to them when, in proving me right or wrong, they agree and disagree with one another. In all I say, decide, or think out for myself or for others, I fasten my eyes on those eight and see their eyes fastened on mine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“The dead are there, whether you believe in them or not.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“The deceased are beyond beautiful, but only because they are so emptied of worry. Everything tense or unlikable is gone. Like a shopping center in the middle of the night, they have lost all the chaos and clatter.”
― Ella Baxter, New Animal

“They loll forever in collossal sleep;
Nor can God's stern, shocked angels cry them up
From their fond, final, infamous decay”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“We filigree and we baste.
But what do the dead care for the fringe of words,
Safe in their suits of milk?
What do they care for the honk and flash of a new style?

And who is to say if the inch of snow in our hearts
Is rectitude enough?”
― Charles Wright

“For there is the fear—a wise fear, I think: that if we speak just once to the dead, the dead will cleave to us in their desperate loneliness and never leave our sides.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“It’s a complete waste of time trying to teach the dead.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“He [Tom Klay]'d watched people tend to corpses thousands of times. They straightened eyeglasses, fixed neckties, picked away bits of makeup, adjusted stray hair. They leaned into caskets and kissed the dead on the forehead, the cheeks, the lips. They spoke to them.

Klay had seen so many dead he couldn't remember his first, but he didn't understand it. A corpse was not a person. It was a thing--an abandoned thing, no more worthy of sentiment than was a dead person's shoes or toothbrush.”
― Bryan Christy, In the Company of Killers

“Song [translated by Sean Cotter]

The present is made only of memories.
What was, no one truly knows.
The dead constantly trade
names, numbers, one, two, three . . .
There is only what will be,
only happenings yet unhappened,
hanging from an unborn branch
half a phantom . . .
There is only my frozen body,
final, stony, and feeble.
My sadness hears how unborn dogs
bark at unborn people.
Only they will truly be.
We who live these moments,
we are a nighttime dream,
a svelte, scampering millipede.”
― Nichita Stănescu

“When do you want to receive tribute, dead or alive? Without dispute, it is cute to pay tribute to the living. Destitute of words to salute good repute is no excuse. Our charity should begin with the living. Parents are a good starting point. We can't reciprocate by giving them life but we can at least impart quality and jollity to their lives by rendering them occasional tribute. If you have swallowed the pleasantries meant for your loved ones, please vomit them now to avoid the constipation of regret.”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu

“The bodiless dead are much harder to grab. But they also can't hurt you, usually.'

'Usually?'

'Never say never.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“… there were wise men I knew when I was young, who taught me that the stars are the eyes of the gods and angels which dwell above and that amongst them the spirits of our ancestors live, those who were granted a place in heaven. It is from there that they watch over us. Whether our actions please them or anger them, of course we cannot know. But whatever you do in your life, you should remember that you are not doing so unseen, and therefore you must never do a thing that you are not prepared to defend if you yourself are called to heaven.”
― T.M Cicinski, From Whence The Rivers Run

“The Mourner by Stewart Stafford

Waxen candles flickered, burning,
I found myself alone in mourning,
Instinct urged me to turn around,
Insistent feet kept walking down.

A lonely casket at the altar lay,
Not a soul came to mourn or pray,
A surge of pity pierced my heart,
Incense bade me dearly depart.

Empty pews where no one stayed,
I slowly illuminated the coffin shade,
Blackout! Icy hands gripped tight:
“Welcome to our endless night!”

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The dead's stories are lifted away from them; they are sentenced to an eternity as deus ex machina in the stories of others.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“The dead, simply by passing into death, somehow become innocent of all charges; it is we, the living, who bear the burden of guilt.

[Tony]”
― Brinda Charry, The East Indian

“How much freedom do dead men enjoy?”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“Do not leave the people to think.”
― Catherine the Great