Dance Of The Red Death Quotes & Sayings

One time I told her that she reminded me of that charming tale, the one with the red shoes."
Helen had always hated that story, in which a little girl who had dared to wear red shoes to her confirmation had been doomed to dance in them until she died. "You're referring to the one by Hans Christian Andersen? It's a morality tale about the wages of sin, is it not?"
His smile faded, and his gaze returned to hers, now appraising rather than dismissive. "I confess, I don't recall the moral of the story."
"No doubt it's been a long time since you've read it." Helen made her face into the inscrutable mask that had always annoyed the twins and provoked them to call her a sphinx. "The red shoes become instruments of death, after a girl yields to temptation. — Lisa Kleypas

They could not listen.
They could not stop.
What they did was the death dance.
What they did would do them in. — Anne Sexton

Dark, shadowy figures moved closer, circling.
Torel pulled his two seyani longswords free of their scabbards. "Come, then!" He shouted. "Come dance with the tairen, if you dare! Miora felah ti' Feyreisa! Joy to the Feyreisa! And death to you all!"
And he became a whirling blur of motion - black leather, shining steel, red blood - spinning in the moonlight, delivering death to all he touched until he moved no more. — C.L. Wilson

What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death.
I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper. — Jeremy Reed

Rising, the woman who had carried the jar began to dance to the music of the rebab, fevered music that was like to the flashing of the recurved blade she flourished aloft. Ever the chimings of the red-gold finger cymbals slipped through, around, and over the exigent strains, and in a minute or three (though it had grown dark) the fluting notes of a syrinx joined them, an eerie piping, more distant far in time than space, that railed against death and the desert, and like a child forlorn sobbed of wildflowers. "Flitting — Gene Wolfe

There is some delight in ale and wine
And some in girls with ankles fine
But my delight, yes always mine
Is to dance with Jak O' the Shadows
We will toss the dice however they fall
And snuggle the girls be they short or tall
Then follow Lord Mat whenever he calls
To dance with Jak O' the Shadows. — Robert Jordan

They had gone. Had left him alone with all the blue, that clashed with the red of fire. Blue as the evening sky, blue as cranesbill flowers, blue as the lips of drowned men and the heart of a blaze burning with too hot a flame. Yes, sometimes it was hot in this world, too. Hot and cold, light and dark, terrible and beautiful, it was everything all at once. It wasn't true that you felt nothing in the land of Death. You felt and heard and smelled and saw, but your heart remained strangely calm, as if it were resting before the dance began again. — Cornelia Funke

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"
At the hole where he went in
Red-Eye called to Wrinkle-Skin.
Hear what little Red-Eye saith:
"Nag, come up and dance with death!"
Eye to eye and head to head,
(Keep the measure, Nag.)
This shall end when one is dead;
(At thy pleasure, Nag.)
Turn for turn and twist for twist
(Run and hide thee, Nag.)
Hah! The hooded Death has missed!
(Woe betide thee, Nag!) — Rudyard Kipling

Hear what little Red-Eye saith: Nag, come up and dance with death! — Rudyard Kipling