Clever Death Quotes & Sayings

There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles — Steven Hall

Sometimes a tragedy must happen to keep a soul on schedule. This is the reason for things that seem to have no reason. This is the reason that we cannot fathom when we are going through it.
Perhaps I will get very sick. People wonder why cancer exists when it is just a clever method to teach people lessons about love and loss. It borrows time or steals it depending on the needs of Heaven. It is a vehicle to get us where we need to be. It calls us home because something needs us there. — Kate McGahan

I'm so happy dancing while the grim reaper
cuts, cuts, cuts, but he can't get me.
I'm as clever as can be, and I'm very quick but don't forget;
we've only got so many tricks.
no one lives forever. — Danny Elfman

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things, not dream them, all day long:
And so make life, death, and that vast for-ever
One grand, sweet song. — Charles Kingsley

[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one. — George Orwell

It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem for us. We feel justified in being annoyed with everything. We feel justified in denigrating ourselves or in feeling that we are more clever than other people. Self-importance hurts us, limiting us to the narrow world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up never satisfied. — Pema Chodron

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. — Oscar Wilde

He was rather a low sort of pony. The fact is, he had been originally jobbed out by the day, and he never quite got over his old habits. He was clever in melodrama too, but too broad
too broad. When the mother died, he took the port-wine business.'
'The port-wine business!' cried Nicholas.
'Drinking port-wine with the clown,' said the manager; 'but he was greedy, and one night bit off the bowl of the glass, and choked himself, so his vulgarity was the death of him at last. — Charles Dickens

There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure — Jack E. Leonard

You scare me, Sebastian. You're so good looking, and so clever, and so damn charming. Hell, you're even sporting a monster dick - not that I go for that sort of thing, but a lot of women do. Sebastian, if someone had to design a death trap for stupid women, you'd be it. — Remittance Girl

I asked my mum, who's a very clever psychotherapist, and she says that kids love stories about death; they need it, they need to have stories that deal with death and explain it, as a place to put their fears. — Roald Dahl

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules. — A.S. Byatt

First, we break bread and drink wine together, telling the story of Jesus and his death, because Jesus knew that this set of actions would explain the meaning of his death in a way that nothing else
no theories, no clever ideas
could ever do. — N. T. Wright

Ohh, how clever," Aden said and clapped. "A death threat. You know what's funny? That's not even my first of the day. — Gena Showalter

The clever way death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out. Generations never fall with one blow - that would be too sad and too obvious. Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what's missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation ... — Alphonse Daudet

Defending oneself by hiding behind the rules was a clever trick, like using a mouse to stampede the enemy's elephants and causing them to trample him to death. — Alan Bradley

This is simple meditation, nothingness and everythingness, the color and the form, death and the void, the end and the beginning, a beginningless end with an endless beginning, Pretty clever if you ask me. — Frederick Lenz

European starvation was rather more cunning and wore a series of clever masks: death came by drink, by tuberculosis, by the knife, by despair in all its manifestations. — Alan Furst

The great help of being in the Army is to understand why are the armies clever in what they describe as emotional intelligence, making soldiers come to terms with the death of comrades by certain rituals. — Antony Beevor

"All men are created equal." "Government by consent of the governed." "Give me liberty or give me death." And those are not just clever words, and those are not just empty theories. — Lyndon B. Johnson

That was something else he had learned from clever Odysseus, who had tied himself to the mast of his ship so that he might hear the captivating song of the sirens without being tempted to his death. If you ever allowed your most sacred promises to be broken - if you set sail with a rope you knew was weak - then you would never be able to enjoy all the best kinds of music. — Anonymous

Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you're not careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you're clever enough to stay out of the army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits. — Alan Sillitoe

When I try to get clever I fail, so I stick with the basic issues of human life on earth - sex, death, relationships, discovering who you are, being hurt and confused. — Barbara Ess

They went Indian file. First came the scouts, clever, graceful, quiet. They had rifles. Next came the antitank gunner, clumsy and dense, warning Germans away with a Colt .45 automatic in one hand and a trench knife in the other.
Last came Billy Pilgrim, empty-handed, bleakly ready for death. Billy was preposterous - six feet and three inches tall, with a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches. He had no helmet, no overcoat, no weapon, and no boots. On his feet were cheap, low-cut civilian shoes which he had bought for his father's funeral. Billy had lost a heel, which made him bob up-and-down, up-and-down. The involuntary dancing, up-and-down, up-and-down, made his hip joints sore. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11:
I'll talk about the situation in Afghanistan ... Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide ... It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don't know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next - in the next couple of weeks ... very casually with no comment ... we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder three or four million people.
Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface 'Turning to the facts ... ') and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political. — Christopher Hitchens

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death
because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses. — Saul Bellow

You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us. — Philip Pullman

Why should death make a man truthful, or even clever? The dead are likely dull fellows, full of tedious complaints - the ground's too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why does he get more worms than I do ... — George R R Martin

If chick-lit really is taking a commercial battering, I'd suggest it's because the marketing has been done to death. Covering everything in girlie pink and putting chocolate in the title may once have been a clever Pavlovian device but now makes readers feel a bit sick. — Jojo Moyes

And thus they form a perfect group; he walks back two or three paces, selects his point of sight, and begins to sketch a hurried outline. He has finished it before they move; he hears their voices, though he cannot hear their words, and wonders what they can be talking of. Presently he walks on, and joins them.
'You have a corpse there, my friends?' he says.
'Yes; a corpse washed ashore an hour ago.'
'Drowned?'
'Yes, drowned; - a young girl, very handsome.'
'Suicides are always handsome,' he says; and then he stands for a little while idly smoking and meditating, looking at the sharp outline of the corpse and the stiff folds of the rough canvas covering.
Life is such a golden holiday to him young, ambitious, clever - that it seems as though sorrow and death could have no part in his destiny. ("The Cold Embrace") — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

JACK.
I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.
ALGERNON.
We have.
JACK.
I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?
ALGERNON.
The fools? Oh! about the clever people, of course.
JACK.
What fools! — Oscar Wilde

[We assume] that the self is an actual living thing, but it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death. — Thandie Newton

The truth is that Fate does not go out of its way to be dramatic. If you or I had the power of life and death in our hands, we should no doubt arrange some remarkably bright and telling effects. A man who spilt the salt callously would be drowned next week in the Dead Sea, and a couple who married in May would expire simultaneously in the May following. But Fate cannot worry to think out all the clever things that we should think out. It goes about its business solidly and unromantically, and by the ordinary laws of chance it achieves every now and then something startling and romantic. Superstition thrives on the fact that only the accidental dramas are reported. — A.A. Milne

She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn't fashionable these days, but it's her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. — Margaret Drabble

The Americans are clever. They thoroughly understand things that have to do with money, war, death, sickness. And there is also a real tradition of skepticism in this country. — Gore Vidal