Alive And Dead Quotes & Sayings

In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of wisdom and should not be done. — Confucius

Another case for the dumbness of reading, however, is that books do not contain answers, but rather pose more questions. And asking questions makes you look dumber, not smarter.
I thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would be a delightful romp through a child's subconscious, but while reading it I started to ask questions like "How do you really speak to other humans when our language often means the opposite of what is intended?" and "How do I really know anyone?" And so on, until I was asking the question "Why even exist at all?"
That didn't make me smarter! That made me wish for death, and being dead looks way dumber than being alive. — Dan Wilbur

And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 4:2-3) — Anonymous

Rebels and dissidents challenge the complacent belief in a just world, and, as the theory would predict, they are usually denigrated for their efforts. While they are alive, they may be called 'cantankerous,' 'crazy,' 'hysterical,' 'uppity,' or 'duped.' Dead, some of them become saints and heroes, the sterling characters of history. It's a matter of proportion. One angry rebel is crazy, three is a conspiracy, 50 is a movement. — Carol Tavris

We will fight a battle, and then we will rest. Alive or dead, we'll rest. - Jon Snow — George R R Martin

A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would be two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is just dead machinery. — Kurt Vonnegut

Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one. — Sam Lipsyte

After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet. What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive. — Douglas Coupland

I don't think there's anything worse than your parents being alive and telling you to go give them some money and just act like they're dead. — T-Pain

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive. — Arthur Miller

This body. This body Dan wanted to possess, and together they made a baby, asleep right now in the very next room. She tells herself that he's alive, that he's well, though some instinct in her tells her, every so often, that the baby is dead, that she needs to rush to his side. Either this will pass, or it never will. This is motherhood. — Rumaan Alam

When you're alive, you don't dwell on how you're going to spend your time once you're dead. You just figure you're gone, and the rest will pretty much take care of itself. Or you think you're not really going to die. You're going to be the first person in the history of the world who doesn't have to. Maybe that's some kind of lie our brains tell us to keep us from going crazy while we're alive. — Margaret Stohl

In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve. — Joseph Campbell

Abraham," he said. "I'm pleased to see you alive, old friend."
"And I to see you dead. — Seth Grahame-Smith

Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god i'm glad i'm dead because death is always better than dishonor? did they say i'm glad i died to make the world safe for democracy? did they say i like death better than losing liberty? did any of them ever say it's good to think i got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? did any of them ever say look at me i'm dead but i died for decency and that's better than being alive? did any of them ever say here i am i've been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it's wonderful to die for your native land? did any of them say hurray i died for womanhood and i'm happy see how i sing even though my mouth is choked with worms? — Dalton Trumbo

Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains. — Samuel Beckett

He's not dead. He is still alive, and while he is alive, he is mine. — Paullina Simons

Moe Berg. Until he's finished reading a paper, he considers it 'alive' and refuses to let anyone else touch it. When he's done, it's 'dead' and anybody can read it. Says he wants to integrate everything from various papers, get a picture - every day." "Then — Gregory Benford

In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace.
All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books. — Richard De Bury

I'm the only American alive or dead who presided unhappily over the removal of a vice president and a president. — Alexander Haig

Nurse. Registered Massage therapist. Yoga instructor. She considered al of the above programs and costed out notions, and returned, always, to the library, to its heat, the fragrance of dried pages like pressed leaves, its quietude. Something else is present here too: oscuridad - the Spanish word for darkness, which Juliet believes contains so much more than its translation. The oscuridad in here mirrors her own: one tiny darkness amidst the darkness of a multitude of minds seeking illumination, dead and alive trapped in dormant words. She thinks she can hear the oscuridad, her cheek pressed to the fake wood of the carrel she has earned; she can hear it, even though the library's lights are forever on. — Carrie Snyder

In the news this week, the polls continue to slide for Gordon Brown and some people are saying he's dead and buried. But I think the opposite - I say GORDON'S ALIVE! — Brian Blessed

I am alone even when I'm in the middle of a crowd.
I am sad even when I'm laughing hysterically.
I am dead even when I'm alive. And isn't that the worst kind? — Amelia Mysko

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,
when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. — Kate Chopin

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only
weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration! — D.H. Lawrence

Banquo asked me how it felt to be alive when I saw so many of my comrades dead or dying, and I said that I had ceased to think of life or death because it seemed that I was destined to serve out the sentence of one for having delivered so well of the other, and that I saw the dead every night before I went to sleep as though they were still alive and standing before me. — Andrew Krivak

Wrote the name and serial number of each prisoner in a big, red ledger. Everybody was legally alive now. Before they got their names and numbers in that book, they were missing in action and probably dead. So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut

Starting the Day
The Legacy Letters
By Carew Papritz
Sometimes we make being happy so difficult. And being thankful such a chore. Starting the day like a job we hate. Beginning it like swallowing ten tablespoons of devil-made cough syrup. Because somehow along the way we forget that being alive and healthy and happy are noble goals-or just good ideas. And that the opposite of being alive is being dead. What a choice. — Carew Papritz

Tolstoy wrote, 'The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.' He understood this service as a religious duty. For me, I understand it as a fact of life, as THE fact of life. What we do for each other is what survives. My sister is dead, but everything she did for me while she was alive is still going strong. I can still feel her hand reaching across the backseat of our car in Berlin, and I still hear her voice, our conversations going late into the night. — Nina Sankovitch

Don't forget you're alive. 'Cause sometimes when you walk around the city and you're in a bad mood, you can think, hey, wait a minute, we're alive! We don't know what the next second will bring and what a fantastic thing this is. This can get easily forgotten in the routine of life, and that's something I'm trying to bring to my attention at all times. Don't forget you're alive. We're not dead, you know. This is the greatest thing. — Joe Strummer

Not that I'm bipolar, but that I'm two people, and not just two people, but two people at odds with each other. The mom and the kid, the homebody and the explorer, the strong and the weak, the logical and the emotional, the funny and the sad, the angry and the calm, the open and the closed, the loved and the hated, the hot and the cold, the alive and the dead, the beautiful and the ugly. It's exhausting. I. Am. Exhausting. — Stacey Turis

He remembers the philosophers dead with detail, and how they honed their trade into the grave for the sake of their livelihoods. Incapable of audacity, they pleasured themselves with a maze constructed of nothing but dead-ends. They were so petrified they might happen upon the truth, might come to know something for certain, that they deployed some of their best minds to obliterate it, scattering its shards into infinity. But they were only trying to keep the dream alive, after all, fighting to keep the questions outnumbering the answers, picking away at the odd dropped stitch in an otherwise ever-tightening blanket of sacrosanct precision. They fought hard, if unwittingly, against the encroaching dullness of complete knowledge, but ultimately paid the price of becoming as dull as their enemy - at least the chemical truths of literature sometimes bothered to wear a suit and tie. — Gary J. Shipley

The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; rather, our fundamental problem is spiritual. It is not just that we are immoral, but that a moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. Herein lies the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus' offer to us. Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive. — Ravi Zacharias

Five weeks since the Rapture "For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." Thessalonians 4:16-17 — Phillip W. Simpson

Growing up, I thought my grandfather was dead. Later, I learned he was alive, but my family pretended he didn't exist because of the terrible way he'd abused my grandmother and my mother. He did things like shave my grandmother's head and lock her in a closet. With my mother's help, my grandmother finally left him. — Deborah Pryce

He could hear trhe voices, the whispers, the sighs, of these souls who were unable to let go of their burdens ... Pi understood this need to hold on. To let let go of his pain. It had become such a part of him. Who would he be without it? The thought frightened him. So he wandered the halls of the catacombs like the other souls who were half-dead and half-alive. — Clare Vanderpool

Just back from canal ride on bike. Went really well until someone threw an egg at me from a bridge. Or maybe it was a bird which went into sudden labour. Will clean off egg, not do Boris Bikes any more and go to Obesity Clinic on bus. At least will be alive and clean when sitting on arse instead of dead and covered in egg. — Helen Fielding

The body is never more alive than when it is dead; but it is alive in its units, and dead in its totality; alive as a congeries, dead as an organism. — Annie Besant

Henceforth we are dead to everything pertaining to ourselves and alive to His Spirit alone. This requires our exercising faith. — Watchman Nee

Sleeping is terrifying.
When you close your eyes and surrender your consciousness to the void, you lose yourself - voluntarily - and you're trustingly assuming you'll find yourself back out of the labyrinth again.
Usually you do.
But sometimes you don't.
It's that uncertainty, more than anything, which kills me. That I might not wake up, and wouldn't know it.
That I could be dead, dreaming I'm alive. — Nenia Campbell

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar. — Margaret Atwood

Golf is a game, and talk and discussion is all to the interests of the game. Anything that keeps the game alive and prevents us being bored with it is an advantage. Anything that makes us think about it, talk about it, and dream about it is all to the good and prevents the game becoming dead. — Alister MacKenzie

It could sometimes be alive and dead at the same time in its bounded but expanding domain. It experienced both conditions and simply didn't like dead. Death was a complex issue for it. — John Macgregor

The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them. — Thomas Carlyle

I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride, and I'm wanted (want-ed ... !) dead or alive ... — Ward Churchill

All men die, Genghis. All. Think what it means for a moment. None of us are remembered for more than one or two generations." He raised a hand as Genghis opened his mouth to speak again. "Oh, I know we chant the names of great khans by the fireside and the Chin have libraries running back for thousands of years. What of it? Do you think it matters to the dead that their names are read aloud? They don't care, Genghis. They are gone. The only thing that matters is what they did while they were alive. — Conn Iggulden

1TH4.16 For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: 1TH4.17 Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. 1TH4.18 Wherefore comfort one another with these words. — Anonymous

A man painstakingly plans for every detail, carefully lays the foundations, picks his moments wisely and adds the right pieces with gusto only to be confronted a turn before the end of the race by a stubborn, more dead than alive, old man. — Angelo Tsanatelis

With her, and only with her, the dead in me is alive. — Becca Ritchie

Kenspeckle was your friend."
"When all this is over, we'll see who's alive and who's dead and then I'll cry, OK? ... Clarabelle's going to feel so bad when this is done with. — Derek Landy

Paraphrasing: An old man claimed to be a psychic. The boy devised a plan to capture a bird, and ask the old man if the bird in his hands was dead or alive. Then he would crush it or let the bird fly, either way proving the man a fraud. So he said, "Tell me old man, is the bird alive or dead?" The wise old man looked at the boy and said, "The bird is as you choose it to be. — Michael Hyatt

You live till you die, and that's the end of it. What good is your legacy when you are dead? I worry about being alive, selling work, having fun, moving and doing things when I am alive. — James Rosenquist

Here, take this, she would say, take this, and tell me where he is. Tell me whether he's dead or alive, so I can walk as his widow or his wife.
No one would, or could, tell her, and so she continued to cook, and to learn new things all the while searching for an answer among the outcasts.
The way he carried his body, the way he walked in my life, Tatiana thought, declared that he was the only man I had ever loved, and he knew it.
And until I was alone without him, I thought it was all worth it. — Paullina Simons

So we go around pigeonholing everything. We put cows in cowsheds, horses in stables, pigs in pigsties, and chickens in chicken coops. The same happens when Sophie Amundsen tidies up her room. She puts her books on the bookshelf, her schoolbooks in her schoolbag, and her magazines in the drawer. She folds her clothes neatly and puts them in the closet - underwear on one shelf, sweaters on another, and socks in a drawer on their own. Notice that we do the same thing in our minds. we distinguish between things made of stone, things made of wool, and things made of rubber. We distinguish between things that are alive or dead, and we distinguish between vegetables, animal, and human — Jostein Gaarder

Because dead people are just like you and me, they still want things. They look at us all the time, and they miss being alive. We have taste and color and smell and feelings, and they don't have any of those things.
They stare at us, they don't miss anything. They really see what's going on, and we hardly ever really see that. We're too busy thinking about things and getting everything wrong, so we miss ninety percent of what's happening. — Peter Straub

And let us, on this birthday of the year, renew each his personal and solemn dedication to God; supplicating forgiveness for the past, and invoking grace to help in every time of need for the future. The atoning blood of Jesus! How solemn and how precious is it at this moment! Bathed in it afresh, we will more supremely, unreservedly, and submissively yield ourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead. We will travel to the open fountain, wash, and be clean. Christ loves us to come as we are. — Octavius Winslow

Ash told me you threw his tracking spell into the river. Why?" She cringed slightly. "Yeah, that. It's hard to explain ..." "Try." The command was firm but his voice was gentle. "I watched him die," she said, her eyes dropping to the sidewalk. "I saw the daggers go into his chest. I saw him fall over the edge. And I thought that was it. I thought he was dead and that it was my fault. When I found out he was alive, I knew I could never let that happen again. I couldn't let him die for me - die fighting my battles. It's not his responsibility to make sure that I survive to the next day. — Annette Marie

Too many Christians are content with appearing to be a bit more moral than the people around them. But the difference between a true Christian and a non-Christian is not about subtle moral distinctions - it's the difference between being alive and being dead! — Francis Chan

The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil were still alive), breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on which a supernatural ceremony could be performed. — Marcel Proust

Possibly everyone now dead considered his own death as a freak accident, a mistake. Some bad luck caused it. Every enterprising man jack of them, and every sunlit vigorous woman and child, too, who had seemed so alive and pleased, was cold as a meat hook, and new chattering people trampled their bones unregarding, and rubbed their hands together and got to work improving their prospects till their own feet slipped and they went under themselves ... Every place was a tilting edge. — Annie Dillard

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger. — Barbara Kingsolver

It's impossible to move through the stages of grief when a person is both dead and alive, the way Min is. It's like she's living permanently in an airport terminal, moving from one departure lounge to another but never getting on a plane. Sometimes I tell myself that I'd do anything for Min. That I'd do whatever was necessary for her to be happy. Except that I'm not entirely sure what that would be. — Miriam Toews

Page 117 Sam says "You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people anymore. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a hole. I don't know. It's like you become ... a doughnut instead of a bun." page 117 — Jojo Moyes

Besides that, I felt guilty. I thought for some reason ... I was alive, and Buddy and those boys were dead, and I didn't know how, but somehow I'd caused it. — Waylon Jennings

You were picking up the vibes off a guy who was supposed to be alive and scaring us, but who was - is - dead and scaring us? — J. Cameron McClain

If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'd rather be alive and have the bad image. — Golda Meir

If life was fair, Elvis would still be alive and all the impersonators dead. — Johnny Carson

Because I wasn't anything anymore. Not anythingI love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are
if doing this to others before they do it to us is all our lives are
we're already dead. Honest to God I feel it, Kade. I'm dead. The hell with me. — David James Duncan

give a fig for the dead while they was still alive, or if they never gave a fig for you, because let's face it, as great a proportion of the dead are arseholes as the living. It stands to reason, although you won't find many funerals begin with 'he was a total pain in the neck and only half as clever as he thought, so let's put him in the ground and have a pint, and good riddance.' I've always thought that would have a certain charm, myself. — Nick Harkaway

Sinners in their natural state lie dead, lifeless, and moveless; they can no more believe in Christ, nor repent, than a dead man can speak or walk: but, in virtue of the promise, the Spirit of life from Christ Jesus, at the time appointed, enters into the dead soul, and quickens it; so that it is no more morally dead, but alive, having new spiritual powers put into it, that were lost by Adam's fall. — Thomas Boston

To it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits[1] of the world, and not according to Christ. 9For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. 11In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. — Anonymous

Occasionally they would hear a harsh croak or a splash as some amphibian was disturbed, but the only creature they saw was a toad as big as Will's foot, which could only flop in a pain-filled sideways heave as if it were horribly injured. It lay across the path, trying to move out of the way and looking at them as if it knew they meant to hurt it.
'It would be merciful to kill it,' said Tialys.
'How do you know?' said Lyra. 'It might still like being alive, in spite of everything.'
'If we killed it, we'd be taking it with us,' said Will. 'It wants to stay here. I've killed enough living things. Even a filthy stagnant pool might be better than being dead.'
'But if it's in pain?' said Tialys.
'If it could tell us, we'd know. But since it can't, I'm not going to kill it. That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad's.'
They moved on. — Philip Pullman

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live. — Neil Gaiman

If feels good to live after death. It feels good to not be dead. It feels so good to find myself alive and flying home. The music plays in my ears and I float further and further away from war. Fucking Baghdad. — Michael Hastings

The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics argue that you can twist time and space, that something can appear out of nothing, and that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. This makes a mockery of our common sense, yet nobody seeks to protect innocent schoolchildren from these scandalous ideas. Why? The theory of relativity makes nobody angry, because it doesn't contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don't care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well, be my guest. Go ahead and bend them. What do I care? In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls — Yuval Noah Harari

I hadn't known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn't very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive. — Simone De Beauvoir

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. — W.G. Sebald

A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways. — John Le Carre

Suddenly, she doesn't want to die. She has no real reason not to, no sudden revelation, except that it's equally pointless to die as not to die. Why doesn't she die? She lives because she's meant to live, because she's already alive and it's comparatively easy to stay that way. She lives because, even though she doesn't know what it is, there must be a reason why she's here in the first place. She lives because either she's not as brave as all the dead girls who've gone before her, or she's actually braver - it's hard to tell. — A.M. Homes

Apparently, when people travel between dimensions, their physical forms are "no longer observable," which is a quantum mechanics thing, and explaining it involves this whole story about a cat that's in a box and is simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box, and it gets seriously complicated. Never ask a physicist about that cat. — Claudia Gray

The Bible does not deny that we were various things - addicts, homosexuals, hateful, prideful, pornographic masturbators - but that is what we were (past tense) (1 Cor. 6:9-11; Titus 3:3-5). The emphasis in Scripture is on what we are and what we are called to be. The Christian does not say, Hello, my name is _ and I am an X Y or Z." The Christian says I was dead, but now I am alive. The Christian says I am a struggling sinner, yet I am a saint. The Christians says I am a new creation; I am transformed. — Paul O'Brien

Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist. — Martin Luther King Jr.

When I am dead
I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form
I want you to just watch and see if I'm not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with "hate". He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol, of "hatred"
and that will help him escape facing the truth that all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race. — Malcolm X

And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. — Jack London

Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life. — Wendell Berry

Keep your words. This pain is no life." "You only feel pain because you're alive, boy!" the keeper thundered. "This is the mystery of it. Life is lived on the ragged edge of the cliff. Fall off and you might die, but run from it and you are already dead! — Ted Dekker

What a sad and frightening time it was. Thousands of firefighters and other rescue workers swarmed the sixteen-acre disaster zone, searching for survivors. The area, which became known as Ground Zero, was extremely dangerous. Underground fires smoldered, and the smoke was a toxic mix of melted plastic, steel, lead, and many poisonous chemicals. Few of the rescue workers had on proper protective clothing or masks. And as it quickly became clear, there were not very many survivors to find. Only fourteen people were pulled out of the rubble alive, all within the first twenty-four hours of the collapse. About 50,000 people had been working in the buildings that day. Two thousand and sixteen died. Also among the dead: 343 firefighters and 60 police officers who were in or near the — Lauren Tarshis

However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive. — Richard Dawkins

A ship doesn't look quite the same from inside, does it? A wise sailor,' Robert said, fanning his arms, 'will one time stand upon the shore and watch his ship sail by, that he shall from then on appreciate not being left behind.' He grinned and added, 'Eh?'

George gave him a little grimace. 'Who's that? Melville? Or C.S. Forrester?'

It's me!' Robert complained. "Can't I be profound now and again?'

Hell, no.'

Why not?'

Because you're still alive. Gotta be dead to be profound.'

You're unchivalrous, George. — Diane Carey

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story - or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall - is, Is it dead or alive? — Mavis Gallant

I see ghosts like you see a normal person. Looking regular, tangible as ever and even more alive than most of the people you'll see walking around the streets. — Tia Artemis

Och, Christ, woman," he hissed. Devouring the space between them in two strides, he cupped her jaw with one big hand, tipped her face up, and claimed her mouth in a kiss. Once, twice, three times. Then he drew back and glared down at her. "I thought you were dead. I couldn't fucking get out of there and I thought of a thousand things I'd done wrong and imagined a million deaths for you. Kiss me, Jessica. Show me you're alive. — Karen Marie Moning

Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't," I said."So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! — Kurt Vonnegut

Such seem'd this Man, not all alive nor dead, Nor all asleep; in his extreme old age: His body was bent double, feet and head Coming together in their pilgrimage; As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage Of sickness felt by him in times long past, A more than human weight upon his frame had cast. — William Wordsworth

I," she [the Holy Spirit] opened her hands to include Jesus and Papa, "I am a verb. I am that I am. I will be who I will be. I am a verb! I am alive, dynamic, ever active and moving. I am a being verb. And as my very essence is a verb, I am more attuned to verbs than nouns. Verbs such as confessing, repenting, living, loving, responding, growing, reaping, changing, sowing, running, dancing, singing, and on and on. Humans, on the other hand, have a knack for taking a verb that is alive and full of grace and turning it into a dead noun or principle that reeks of rules. Nouns exist because there is a created universe and physical reality, but the universe is only a mass of nouns, it is dead. Unless 'I am' there are no verbs and verbs are what makes the universe alive. — Wm. Paul Young

People say to you, 'you've changed', or something like that. Well, I hope, for the sake of God, that I have changed, because I don't want to be the same person all my life. I want to be growing, I want to be expanding. I want to be changing. Because animate things change, inanimate things don't change. Dead things don't change. And the heart should be alive, it should be changing, it should be moving, it should be growing and its knowledge should be expanding. — Hamza Yusuf

Winston points at my face. His eyes are a little unfocused, and he has to blink a few times before saying, I like you. It's pretty nice you're not dead. — Tahereh Mafi

The day after we returned from Iorn Fist I woke up and I want either one of them anymore. Somewhere in between a girl I thought was long dead and a woman that was too blood thirsty for me to particularly like. But I thought about all that had happened the day before and decided that I liked being alive. So I wanted to than you for not letting me die. — Michael A. Stackpole