Alive But Dead Quotes & Sayings

I'm going to kill myself. I should go to Paris and jump off the Eiffel Tower. I'll be dead. you know, in fact, if I get the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier, which would be perfect. Or wait a minute. It
with the time change, I could be alive for six hours in New York but dead three hours in Paris. I could get things done, and I could also be dead. — Woody Allen

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

When I noticed other people, I wondered what it was like to be alive. They did not know, could not know, how I felt inside. My shell still passed for normal. I felt like I should scream for help, someone should help, but I knew that the time for screaming had passed. Best to just keep on walking, walking dead, one of the few things I could still do. So I kept walking. — Jonathan Rottenberg

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

I totally, completely loved my nephew. I knew this from the instant he was born. But I rejoiced in it then, looking into his eyes because it made me understand that Darrin wasn't really dead since that part of him was alive in his son. — Kristen Ashley

Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive. Worldviews — Ravi Zacharias

What I want to tell you is what I think he would tell you if he could.
Living means taking chances. Risks. Playing it safe all the time is being dead inside, even if you happen to still be breathing. people expected Connor to play it safe all the time. And when he did, he felt dead inside. I saw him take risks, and then he was the most alive person I've ever known. he would ask you to take chances. Sometimes that means getting hurt. Getting an F. Losing a game. Losing someone you love. But if you always play it safe, you lose anyway. — Ellen Hopkins

Most of being young, she had always thought, was playing a game of elimination with an army of different selves until you settled on one, usually by circumstance. But what made her grin, sitting across a starched white tablecloth from a man who seemed to actually listen to her, was the feeling that all those other selves weren't dead. They were still alive - multitudes of them, waiting inside her. — Ted Thompson

1TH4.13 But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. 1TH4.14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. 1TH4.15 For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. 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. — Anonymous

I've been half dead for ten years, Gris, but then you walked back into my life, and I came alive again. You make me want to live. You make me want to be a better man.
I love you, and when I said that, I mean that you're my reason for breathing, for eating, for drinking, for sleeping, for living. I will never hurt you. I will never leave you. I will always protect you. There is no one more important to me than you, and as long as I live, there never will be. — Katy Regnery

You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Nit even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all. — Michael Chabon

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

The bird looked much smaller dead than alive. Jody felt a little mean pain in his stomach, so he took out his pocketknife and cut off the bird's head. Then he disemboweled it, and took off its wings; and finally he threw all the pieces into the brush. He didn't care about the bird, or its life, but he knew what older people would say if they had seen him kill it; he was ashamed because of their potential opinion. — John Steinbeck

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

Bugs like these we've got here, you aren't going to find those unless you slow down and hunt really hard. Live nearby for a while and look. At which point it's too late, if you get a bad result. You're out of luck then." Long silence as he walked south along the beach. Then: "It's too bad. It really is a very pretty world." Later: "What's funny is anyone thinking it would work in the first place. I mean it's obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it's alive it's going to be poisonous, if it's dead you're going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work, but it might take about as long as it took Earth. Even if you've got the right bugs, even if you put machines to work, it would take thousands of years. So what's the point? Why do it at all? Why not be content with what you've got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the fuck were they?" This sounded much like Devi, and Freya put her head — Kim Stanley Robinson

But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ship s sink, or maybe we're grass
our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. — John Green

This is what I decided:
Chloe is gone. She is never coming back. And the way I've been acting would hurt her. For at least an hour, I switch places with her in my mind-I am dead and Chloe is alive. How would she handle it? She would cry. She would be sad. She would miss me. But she wouldn't stop living. She would let people comfort her. She would sleep in her own room and smile at the memories as she drifted to sleep. And she would probably punch Galen Forza. Which brings me to what else I decided:
Galen Forza is a jerk. The details are hazy, but I'm pretty sure he had something to do with my accident on Monday. Also, he's a bit weird. Staring habit aside, he keeps popping up everywhere. Every time he does, I handle it with the grace of a rhino on stilts. So I'm switching my schedule as soon as I get to school. There is no good reason I should humiliate myself for seven periods a day. — Anna Banks

Disneyland is something that will never be finished. It's something that I can keep developing. It will be a live, breathing thing that will need change. A picture is a thing, once you wrap it up and turn it over to Technicolor, you're through. Snow White is a dead issue with me. But I can change the park, because it's alive. — Walt Disney

Christians should be some of the most conflicted people in the world. It is far simpler to be dead to God and to live for oneself. But Christians must struggle against their selfish ambition because they are alive to God in Christ Jesus, and the indwelling Spirit turns on the lights to enable them to see their sin. — Michael S. Horton

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

You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished. — Neil Gaiman

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

I dreamed of you and a dead dragon, Egg's brother Daeron said to him. A great beast, huge, with wings so large they could cover this meadow. It had fallen on top of you, but you were alive and the dragon was dead.
And so he was, poor Baelor. Dreams were a treacherous ground on which to build. — George R R Martin

When we die, we die. No more. Once the spider-thread of life is severed, the human body is but a mass of corrupting vegetable matter. A feast for worms. That is all. Tell me, what is more ridiculous than the notion of an immortal soul; than the belief that when a man is dead, he remains alive, that when his life grinds to a halt, his soul
or whatever you call it
takes flight? — Marquis De Sade

But this is for the best. I can see that. We were never meant to be. You were never as strong as I thought you were. Such a shame though. You had such dirty wings. Such promise. Power makes the world go around, angel. It keeps you alive when you should be dead. Don't you want that immortality? Or are you so happy with a boring, ordinary life? With a boring, ordinary man? — Karina Halle

We'd known each other over a very short period of time. He left France in June of 1964, and I'm writing this in April 1992. I never received word from him and I don't know if he's dead or alive. The memory of him had remained dormant, but now it has suddenly come flooding back this early spring of 1992. Is it because I came across the picture of my girlfriend and me, on the back of which a blue stamp says Photo by Jansen. All rights reserved? Or for the simple reason that every spring looks the same? Today the air was light, the buds had burst on the trees in the gardens of the Observatoire, and the month of April 1992 merged by an effect of superimposition with the month of April 1964. — Patrick Modiano

People used to recordings believed every piece of music had a definitive sound, its emotional context trapped in amber, a butterfly pinned to a board; beautiful, but dead. Live music was just that. Alive. — Tanya Huff

See how the World its Veterans rewards!
A Youth of Frolics, an old Age of Cards;
Fair to no purpose, artful to no end,
Young without Lovers, old without a Friend;
A Fop their Passion, but their Prize a Sot;
Alive ridiculous, and dead forgot. — Alexander Pope

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

Several of our company told of ghosts, one, how a man had been slain on the way to the wars, but had not known it, his ghost going on, thinking himself alive, performing deeds of great valor, even returning home in triumph where he bought lands, begot sons, and lived in contentment for many years before discovering one day, by chance, that he was already dead. — H.P. Lovecraft

Our ability to fulfill any assignment is greatly enhanced when we understand the importance of the temple and pay close attention to all that is said and done there. The temple is for redeeming not only the dead but the living as well. All are alive in God, and He is no respecter of persons. Blessings always come from hearing and obeying His word, and His word is never more clear than in the temple. — John H. Groberg

Everything hurts. He can barely lie still. He feels caught. He wants to run, but where? He feels certain he will always remain like this - trapped within his own body, his own mind. The emotional pain is so strong, it becomes physical. He feels it knotting and twisting inside him, ready to crush him, suffocate him. He is losing his grip, he is losing his mind. He thought he had it all back under control, but suddenly nothing makes sense any more. Does anyone else know what it's like to be stuck somewhere between dead and alive? I't s a half-world of incoherent pain where emotions you put on ice start slowly thawing again. A place where everything hurts, where your mind is no longer strong enough to force your feelings back into hibernation. — Tabitha Suzuma

I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn't dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it's harder to burn memories when you've still got life left. When you're alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret. — Christopher Barzak

But, 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. — Richard Dawkins

All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door. — C.S. Lewis

But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand. — Philip K. Dick

Listen,' Thomas said, slowly getting to his feet, hoping Minho wouldn't be stupid enough to try anything. "There's something about us. We're not just random shanks who showed up on your doorstep. We're valuable. Alive, not dead."
The anger on Jorge's face lessened ever so slightly. Maybe a spark of curiosity. But what he said was 'What's a shank? — James Dashner

She came alive as one returns from sleep. Alive but different. An empty husk capable of thought, of hearing, of processing. Of wanting men dead. — Hugh Howey

A heartbreaking paradox: if only I can finish my work so that it will live. Yet if it is finished, completed, a part of me but departed from me, I lost it alive, living but separate; and if it does not leave me, it is incomplete, insufficient, and half-dead that I keep it. — Helene Cixous

For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead. — Roland Barthes

17 v When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But v he laid his right hand on me, w saying, Fear not, x I am the first and the last, 18and the living one. y I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and z I have the keys of Death and Hades. — Anonymous

For starters, would your soul mate even still be alive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billion are alive now (which gives the human condition a 93 percent mortality rate). If we were all paired up at random, 90 percent of our soul mates would be long dead. — Randall Munroe

It can't be," Udecht stammered. "Eadran the Vanquisher destroyed him near a millennium ago. Maelgrum is gone. Finished."
"My dear bishop, he isn't exactly alive, I grant you," the hooded medusa teased. "But he is certainly a lot less dead than you would like. — T.O. Munro

Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy. — Leo Tolstoy

Many times in our lives, we act like He's still dead. But several times today, we've testified that He's not. So which is it? Why say one thing with your mouth and yet live another with your life? If He's alive, act like it. He either is or He isn't. You can't be half-alive. — Charles Martin

He put his hand over my mouth. His hand felt warm, full of blood, the hand of a living man. "Death is a gift, so long as it is nature's hand. But this," he drew his hand away, and nodded toward the dead man in the grass. "When we are called back unnaturally, Death demands a price, for there is always a balance. If I am alive, then someone else must die before his time. This is what you have done. But he is the lucky one. He is at peace. I know what awaits him, and I envy him. — Douglas Clegg

Well, first of all if it wasn't for being saved by Jesus, I would not be alive. I would be dead. Some people say Jesus saved their soul ... Well, maybe Jesus saved my soul spiritually, but He also saved my life physically. Every aspect of my life today has to do with the fact that Jesus saved my life. — Lacey Mosley

Others were found with their heads buried in holes in the earth, and it was evident that they had made theses holes for themselves, had heaped up the soil on their faces, and so suffocated themselves. Of all sights, the most striking was a Numidian who lay with a dead Roman upon him; he was alive, but his ears and nose were mangled, for with hands that were powerless to grasp a weapon, the man's rage had turned to madness, and he had breathed his last while he tore his enemy with his teeth. — Livy

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts ... .We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need - not all the time, surely, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember - the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. — Frederick Buechner

The night she died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels - looking for something good. At the time, in 1989, it seemed a fairly unusual way to die. Nowadays, I suspect, more and more people are dropping off that way. And we're still looking for something good on television. We won't find it. There's precious little on TV that can keep us awake or alive. Ever the prophet, Owen Meany was right about television, too. — John Irving

You're not dead, but you're not alive, either. You're a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You're a ghost with a beating heart. Soon you'll cross the border and be with me. I'm so stoked. I miss you wicked. — Laurie Halse Anderson

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive. — G.K. Chesterton

What happened, man? Gerry and Ginsberg are cold, and dead, in the ground. Kesey's stoned, and out of town. We've come to the end of the brotherhood song. The children brandish knives upon each other's throats, and their loaded 45's sit snug in lunch boxes nestled safely between Oreo cookies and a ham sandwich. Where are you now, oh ancient hipsters? Raggedy Beats beat down and broken wheel raggedy wheelchairs down ghostly geriatric wards. Where are you now, oh day-glow dreamers? Have you gotten off the bus and into your Mercedes? Did you get that second mortgage, and bear your fattened little babies? Where is that girl with flowers in her hair? Where is the man with revolution in his veins? We ask ourselves "where did we go wrong?" But there is no we. There is you, and then there is I. You do what you need to survive, And I do what I must to stay alive. We stand here Bleeding, slicing each other's wrists With the icy ridges of hardened jagged hearts, Cassandra's — Bearl Brooks

I believe in life. I believe it to be something that is eternal, powerful and spread throughout the universe -- something like gravity. There are many such energies. Once we are able to detect life it will boggle our minds for centuries to come. The shear magnitude will rapture many, and destroy others, but we're not there yet. We can say something is alive, or dead, but not if life is there or not. Perhaps because it is too quiet, maybe because it is so loud we can hear nothing else, but mainly -- I believe -- because we haven't bothered to listen yet. -- from the Black Dog — Glenn Hefley

But then you become closed. Then you start dying as far as your intelligence is concerned because intelligence needs the open sky, the wind, the air, the sun in order to grow, to expand, to flow. To remain alive it needs a constant flow; if it becomes stagnant it becomes slowly slowly a dead phenomenon. — Rajneesh

I am not dead" argued Edward. "There are nefarious villains who would have you believe I died. But any accounts of my demise have been grossly exaggerated, I assure you, for here I am, very much alive. — Cynthia Hand

Sometimes I feel foolish for hoping she's alive. But then I feel guilty--as if being 'realistic' is giving up.
Other times, I think the uncertainty is the worst part. Alive or dead, I just need to know...
Or maybe that's just a bullshit rationalization. Because I know the day you come here to tell me that she's dead will be the worst day of my life. — Jeff Jensen

Dead, but not allowed to die. Alive, but as good as dead. — Suzanne Collins

The chime wasn't the most pleasant sound in the world to wake up to, but Eric had awakened to far worse in the past. Gunfire was always a sure way to go from dead to the world to more alive than you'd ever been, assuming none of the bullets actually struck you. — Evan Currie

Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today. — Robert Jordan

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

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

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

We should not weep for the arriving soul - It isn't dead. We should weep instead for the one whose body is alive, but whose soul is dead because of its alienation from that which gives it life: God. — Yasmin Mogahed

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

I'm alive,' said Shadow. 'I'm not dead. Remember?'
'You're not dead,' Laura said. 'But I'm not sure you're alive, either. Not really. — Neil Gaiman

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will not say that your mulberry trees are dead; but I am afraid they're not alive. — Jane Austen

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

I couldn't help but feel as if everyone had lied about everything. We all had secrets. We all had a dark side to our innocent cover. I wondered what we would be like, if we had been completely honest with each other in the first place. Maybe more people would be alive, but then again, more people could be dead. — Shannon A. Thompson

Bill Clinton is the only ex-president who hasn't planned his own funeral. But, in his defense, in the past he has said he wants to be buried next to Hillary. I guess he figures he never slept next to her when they were alive, might as well try it now that they're dead. — Jay Leno

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

I'm lucky. Usually you're dead to get your own museum, but I'm still alive to see mine. — Yogi Berra

I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands. — Toni Morrison

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

Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination. — Jean Baudrillard

I mean it's obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it's alive it's going to be poisonous, if it's dead you're going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work, but it might take about as long as it took Earth. Even if you've got the right bugs, even if you put machines to work, it would take thousands of years. So what's the point? Why do it at all? Why not be content with what you've got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the fuck were they? This — Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

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

I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back. — Elif Batuman

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

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

On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive - the sum of the parts equal more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart. — Jodi Picoult

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

I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead. — Jewel

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

Here's the thing," he said. "People see me as a bridge. I'm not as alive as I used to be, but I'm not yet dead. I'm sort of ... in-between — Mitch Albom

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

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