Dead Body Quotes & Sayings

I was with her when she died," Ned reminded the king. "She wanted to come home, to rest beside Brandon and Father." He could hear her still at times. Promise me, she had cried, in a room that smelled of blood and roses. Promise me, Ned. The fever had taken her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister's eyes. Ned remembered the way she smiled then, how tightly her fingers had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals spilling from her palm, dead and black. After that he remembered nothing. They had found him still holding her body, silent with grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand from his. — George R R Martin

I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters. — Harriet Ann Jacobs

Being a woman is worse than being a farmer there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturised, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised.
The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed. Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature - with a full beard and handlebar moustache on each shin Dennis Healey eyebrows face a graveyard of dead skin cells spots erupting long curly fingernails like Struwelpeter blind as bat and stupid runt of species as no contact lenses flabby body flobbering around. Ugh ugh. Is it any wonder girls have no confidence? — Helen Fielding

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us. — Charles Caleb Colton

The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and the mouth. Farther away and nearer still, still it came from dead fathers and from wondering races, from lands which had turned to stone, lands weary of their poor tribes, for when grief took to the roads the people set out and arrived and married new land and water to grow their words again. And so this is the inheritance; this is the wavelength which connects us with dead men and the dawning of new beings not yet come to light. — Pablo Neruda

This was it, the big moment: the corpse of his chief enemy, the ruins of his creator, the body of his dead father; the great weight of all that was unsaid and would never have been said; the pressure to say it now, when there was nobody to hear, and to speak also on his father's behalf, in an act of self-division that might fissure the world and turn his body into a jigsaw puzzle. This was it. — Edward St. Aubyn

The decision to use torture as a terror of retribution gives an inner satisfaction to the person who practises it, even if this is difficult for him to accept openly. Having been injured and humiliated by aggression, he can now humiliate in his turn those whom he considers to be his aggressors, and rediscover his self-esteem. As an ex-soldier of the Algerian War explains, forty years after the events: 'You could feel a certain form of jubilation while being present at such extreme scenes . . . Doing to a body whatever you feel like doing to it.' Reducing the other to a state of complete impotence gives you a feeling of supreme power. This feeling is one which torture gives you more than murder does, since the latter does not last: once dead, the other becomes an inert object and no longer produces that jubilation which stems from fully triumphing over the will of another, without his ceasing to exist. — Tzvetan Todorov

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

Wasn't there a tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the back of the one who had murdered it? That would certainly be justice - to carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as public shame and damnation. — Toni Morrison

An old friend will help you move. A good friend will help you move a dead body. — Jim Hayes

I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you could. Like those dreams of flying- dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body- if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you'd crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church. — Laura Kasischke

Immortality: "It is impossible to be conscious of being unconscious."

It is not possible to be aware of being unconscious from your own perspective. You cannot be aware of not being aware. You can be less aware/conscious, such as when you are asleep, but not completely unconscious (dead), because time would stand still for you. A billion years could pass, and you would not know it.

How do you know you are dead? It is not possible to be aware of any gaps in life; it is continuous and never-ending from your own point of view.

Death and birth are a continuous event from your own perspective.

You will die physically, but you will be born into a new physical body. Being born happens, or you would not be here now. You were born into this life. It is what we know happens. There is no evidence anything else happens. True or false? — Michael Smith

We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church. — Charles Caleb Colton

I, for one, approve of Lock's new mom car. Obviously I wouldn't be caught dead owning one myself, but I like that we can transport a body and have enough cup holders for all of us. — Lish McBride

His long wait is almost done. I am sending Balon Swann to Sunspear, to deliver him the head of Gregor Clegane." Ser Balon would have another task as well, but that part was best left unsaid.
"Ah." Ser Harys Swyft fumbled at his funny little beard with thumb and forefinger. "He is dead then? Ser Gregor?"
"I would think so, my lord," Aurane Waters said dryly. "I am told that removing the head from the body is often mortal. — George R R Martin

As a child, I didn't know what they mean by 'to die.' So I grew up in a place where people used to die all the time, but a child is not allowed to see a dead body. When you ask, 'Where is so-and so?' you're told, 'He's gone to another world where we all go to live in the future.' — Emmanuel Jal

Bill read in a biology book about how cells replace themselves over the years; how bodies died and were remade out of interchangeable pieces. It depressed him how foreign his younger self looked to him now, how his body had stolen the identity of this happy dead kid, and with his own life, had made a complete mess of it — Don Hertzfeldt

I looked at all the trees and didn't know what to do.
A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.
From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.
I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.
Your body told me in a dream it's never been afraid of anything. — Richard Siken

For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence. — Simone De Beauvoir

At 17, the first time I saw a dead body, I froze. By 31 it was a natural occurrence for me, and no group of people should live like that. — Leymah Gbowee

He places the skull in the palm of my hand. There are four canines; the top two are so long and curved I can feel them pricking my skin. There's a green tinge round the eye socket and in a fine line across the cranium. I'm not sure what animal it's from.
'Stoat,' Harris says, as if I've spoken out loud. 'They hunt grouse and partridge. I found it behind my house. I buried the body in the furze until it was just bone.'
His hand is still beneath mine, supporting it. I think of him seeing the small dead creature and digging a tiny grave for it. Planning ahead for all those months just so he'd see the skeleton. Or maybe he severed the animal's head and that was the only part he buried.
'It's been waiting for you all this time. Like I have. — Sanjida Kay

When the weather's nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie's grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn't too bad when the sun was out, but twice - twice - we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That's what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner - everybody except Allie. I couldn't stand it. I know it's only his body and all that's in the cemetery, and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand it anyway. I just wished he wasn't there. — J.D. Salinger

The world slowed to the beat of an ancient, ageless drum.
Celaena behold the room.
The blood was everywhere.
Before the bed, Nehemia's bodyguards lay with their throats cut from ear to ear, their internal organs spilling out onto the floor.
And on the bed ...
On the bed ...
She could hear the shouts growing closer, reaching the room, but their words were somehow muffled, as though she were underwater, the sounds coming from the surface above.
Celaena stood in the center of the freezing bedroom, gazing at the bed, and the princess's broken body atop it.
Nehemia was dead. — Sarah J. Maas

He has studied all the live strings of the human heart in the same way as one studies the veins of a dead body. — Mikhail Lermontov

I'll take him to the hospital " Bernardo said "but what do we put on the paperwork "
"Tell them it was a lover's quarrel " Olaf said.
"Over my dead body " I said.
"Eventually " he said.
"Don't be a sick fuck Olaf " I said. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding, females in our society of 1860's England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was finding a warm responsive body amidst the cold dead forms on slabs in the Paris morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to. — Dan Simmons

Eliza," said George, "people that have friends, and houses, and lands, and money, and all those things, can't love as we do, who have nothing but each other ... And your loving me, - why, it was almost like raising one from the dead! I've been a new man ever since! And now, Eliza, I'll give my last drop of blood, but they shall not take you from me. Whoever gets you must walk over my dead body. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Shinji slowly fell forward onto his face. Debris bounced up on impact. It took less than thirty seconds for the rest of his body to die. The memento of his beloved uncle
the earring worn by the woman he loved
was now stained with the blood running down Shinji's left ear, reflecting the glow from the red flames of the farm building.
And so the boy known as the Third Man, Shinji Mimura, was dead. — Koushun Takami

Deathstorm sees Power Ring as a fascinating experiment. Deathstorm is a scientist who's been merged with the dead body of his lab assistant. It's given him a cold demeanor and a clammy touch. — Geoff Johns

Better beware of the newly dead

Of the white-handed ghost

And the brightness of these lamps . . .

wrote Luc Berimont in 1940, in Reign of Darkness.

I've always felt the greatest reluctance to go anywhere near, to touch, a fresh corpse. For me, it's an unseemly thing. Useless. Hostile. Cunning. Dangerous. The 'presence' is much stronger, more perceptible one hour after death than one hour before. By my observation, this was not the case with Heisserer.

He was entirely absent from his head, his hands,his quivering body. He was gone instantly, unburdened of his absurd life, released. — Jacques Yonnet

Cotton rows crisscross the world
And dead-tired nights of yearning
Thunderbolts on leather strops
And all my body burning
Sugar cane reach up to God
And every baby crying
Shame a blanket of my night
And all my days are dying — Maya Angelou

Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his father's house had led him into an undiscovered country, and he was wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, in place of the hum and murmur of the summer, an infinite silence seemed to fall on all things, and the wood was hushed, and for a moment in time he stood face to face there with a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form. And in that moment, the sacrament of body and soul was dissolved, and a voice seemed to cry "Let us go hence," and then the darkness of darkness beyond the stars, the darkness of everlasting. — Arthur Machen

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

Guide to the world of the dead. When you are certain that the body has left you, feel sad for the good you didn't get to do; then stop feeling sad and begin your journey to the past. Feel happy for the evil you didn't get to do, then stop feeling happy and realize that what propels you is chance, which when you were going in the opposite direction seemed to you like order, or necessity. — Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Colt was pleased they'd chosen a closed casket. It was an occupational hazard that he'd seen more death than most and it was never pretty. Dead, was dead, it was unattractive, no matter who did the makeup or what outfit you chose and how much satin lined the casket. Colt thought viewing a dead body at a funeral home was one last but forced, indignity and he hated it. — Kristen Ashley

Handling a dead body is not a repugnant or frightening experience and, somehow, it helps to accept the fact that the soul of that person has gone if you treat the body with reverence and respect before it is finally disposed of by cremation or burial. — Jennifer Worth

Now, if the writers of these four books [Gospels] had gone into a court of justice to prove an alibi, (for it is of the nature of an alibi that is here attempted to be proved, namely, the absence of a dead body by supernatural means,) and had they given their evidence in the same contradictory manner as it is here given, they would have been in danger of having their ears cropt for perjury, and would have justly deserved it. Yet this is the evidence, and these are the books, that have been imposed upon the world as being given by divine inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God. — Thomas Paine

We shrink from the contemplation of our dead bodies, forgetting that when dead they are no longer ours, and concern us as little as the hairs that have fallen from our heads. — John Lancaster Spalding

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,
that soft summer morning
round a turning in the path,
the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,
its legs in the air like a woman in need
burning its wedding poisons
like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,
I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,
but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.
I am the vampire of my own heart,
one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter
who can no longer smile.
Am I dead?
I must be dead. — Charles Baudelaire

It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don't stop working -hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste - but he's not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts. — George Orwell

I have decided that when I'm dead I'd like my body in the woods under a light coating of leaves. That being against the law, maybe I will go for cremation. I ask Chuck what he wants done with his remains. "Remains?" says Chuck. "Do there have to be remains? Can't I just vanish? Be no more?" I tell him I'm sorry but yes, he has to have remains. "Either I'm too young to be thinking about this," he says, "or I have to figure out a way of offing myself that will leave no remains. I could get in the shower with a chain saw, — Abigail Thomas

Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other? — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. At the centre of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw its results when that facade opened to reveal a dead body. This genre, with its dialectics of seen and unseen, inside and outside, exit and entrance, was a simultaneously internal and external, intellectual and somatic expression of contemporary questions about the inward sources of harm, knowledge, power, and darkness. — Ruth Padel

Ciel: *Over Sebastian's 'dead' body* THAT'S AN ORDER! WAKE UP! RIGHT NOW!
Sebastian: *thinking* But I am awake ... — Yana Toboso

Then Freddie was transformed into a moth. His old empty body fell forward face first into the water with a splash. Slicked back hair tied in a ponytail floated on the surface of the pool like a dead rodent on the sea as Freddie fluttered up towards a nearby streetlamp. — Stephen Livingston

One day I realized that I really needed to stop losing myself in my work and in my addictions. What happens is you just wake up one morning and feel absolutely dead. You can't even drag your soul back into your body. You feel you have negated everything that is wonderful about life. When you have fallen that far, it feels like a miracle when you regain your love of life. That's when you can begin really looking for a relationship. When you can appreciate the whole concept of giving to someone, not just taking. — David Bowie

Passing inside they looked towards the bed. Dr. Livingstone was not lying on it, but appeared to be engaged in prayer, and they instinctively drew backwards for the instant. Pointing to him, Majwara said, "When I lay down he was just as he is now, and it is because I find that he does not move that I fear he is dead." They asked the lad how long he had slept? Majwara said he could not tell, but he was sure that it was some considerable time: the men drew nearer. A candle stuck by its own wax to the top of the box, shed a light sufficient for them to see his form. Dr. Livingstone was kneeling by the side of his bed, his body stretched forward, his head buried in his hands upon the pillow. For a minute they watched him: he did not stir, there was no sign of breathing; then one of them, Matthew, advanced softly to him and placed his hands to his cheeks. It was sufficient; life had been extinct some time, and the body was almost cold: Livingstone was dead. — David Livingstone

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

I think most character people that you talk to, it's like, whatever they offer us, we are thrilled to do. I won't do anything that's immoral or illicit. I did turn down eating a dead body once. I turned down a few really creepy horror movies. For the most part, I can usually find a way into whatever character. — Beth Grant

Being a hangman requires you to take someone else's life based on someone else's judgment, and carry it out on someone else's schedule. The job does not provide the same satisfaction that an ordinary murderer gets from smashing a skull. It robs them of the fulfillment of plunging a knife into someone's throat. In the world of capital punishment, the prisoner's crimes have been sanitized by years of sitting on death row. By then, the execution is a cold and impersonal affair. There is prayer, a noose, and a few last words. The prisoner then experiences a sudden rush of blood to the head. At the end of it all, you have a broken neck and a dead body swinging from the end of a rope. That is it. You don't get to manhandle them with your own hands. That's why the brutes you mention will never be hired. So you see, Vaida, this is not a job for a murderer. It is a job for a humanitarian. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. "& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. "& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. "& that nobody is wished to see my dead body. "& that no mourners walk behind me at my funeral. "& that no flowers be planted on my grave, "& that no man remember me. "To this I put my name. — Thomas Hardy

And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in the cold mud, somewhere in the city's wake. — Philip Reeve

Myrnin, who hadn't said much, suddenly reached out and wrapped his arms around her.
She stiffened, shocked, and for a panicked second wondered whether he'd suddenly decided to snack on her neck ... but it was just a hug.
His body felt cold against hers, and way too close, but then he let go and stepped back. "You've done very well. I'm extremely proud of you," he said. There was a touch of color high in his pale cheeks. "Do go home now. And shower. You reek like the dead."
Which, coming from a vampire, was pretty rich. — Rachel Caine

She's an innocent mortal. She deserves better than me."
"Right, because you're a disgusting, slobbering beast who'll rip her throat out and toss her dead body out to sea. — Kerrelyn Sparks

Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was. — Bruce Jackson

All right," I said. "But from now on, every time you show me a dead body, I'm having sex with Eric. — Jennifer Echols

I was actually drowning in a pool full of people and I knew how to swim. I wondered how long it would take someone to realize there was a dead body in the pool. Would I sink or bounce on the surface like a floating chlorinator? — Ashlan Thomas

What?" I asked, deciding to go with uppity. "Enjoying yourself?" Hank asked, his mouth twitching. "No," I said angrily. "I'm dead. Now I have to run all the way back to my lifeless body and get my stuff. The orcs and trolls will be hanging around and we'll have to fight them and I can't do that without my good armor. I'll have to use the crappy stuff I have stashed in my trunk. I had a really good sword and helmet and now they're gone. That just plain sucks." Hank stared at me. Then he said, "You do know I don't know what the fuck you're talkin' about." "Diablo," I replied, like that explained it all. — Kristen Ashley

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

But huge photographs of dead bodies are slightly different. I couldn't find much humor there. — PJ Harvey

The brontosaurus had thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of filled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything - dead meat, living meat, old bones - — John Updike

Despite my lifetime of declining rich desserts, my evenings spent jogging, regardless of all my careful moderation and self-discipline - I'm trapped, wadded inside a shell of steel and aluminum. My body, violated in countless places by fragments of broken glass. My low-cholesterol blood rushes to abandon me in hot, leaping spurts. Despite all my care, the heart-attack victim and I will both be just as dead. — Chuck Palahniuk

The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:
The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.
So long as man clamors for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught:
When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.
For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:
When that comes, then work is put away.
The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.
The musk is in the deer, but is seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass. — Kabir

The heat of the incinerator wrapped around Inej like a living thing, a desert dragon in his den, hiding from the ice, waiting for her. She knew her body's limits, and she knew she had no more to give. She'd made a bad wager. It was as simple as that. The autumn leaf might cling to its branch, but it was already dead. The only question was when it would fall. — Leigh Bardugo

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

It was my first dead body and I waited for the appropriate feelings. I didn't know what feelings to expect, which was worse than realising that I had none. — John Mole

It's not that I liked lunacy for the sake of lunacy, but if a writer can truly surprise me without throwing logic completely out the window, then that writer has me for good. Most book surprises aren't surprising at all but follow a formula, like the dead body that's certain to lurch out of a wreck being explored by deep-sea divers in just about every book that involves wrecks and divers. — Will Schwalbe

What it means: The world focuses on what people look like on the outside. God focuses on what people look like on the inside. Do you put more time and effort into being pretty on the outside or the inside? As you get older, you will meet Christian girls who spend more time trying to find the perfect outfit, get the perfect tan, find the perfect lip gloss, and have the perfect body. While there's nothing wrong with wanting to look pretty, we need to make sure it's in balance. God would rather see us work on becoming drop-dead gorgeous on the inside. You know, the kind of girl who talks to Him on a regular basis (prayer) and reads her Bible. — Vicki Courtney

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void. — Fernando Pessoa

It happened as it always did, swallowing her swiftly and completely. Intense. Painful. Quick, vivid colors spun beneath her eyelids. Sounds were sharp inside her skull. Fire shot up through her bones. She may have been screaming and she wouldn't have known. There was smoke in her nose, thick and black, and she couldn't breathe. It stung her eyes and licked at her skin. Wood and metal crashed down as skin blistered and popped and she knew this wasn't her, knew it was someone else, someone with a bigger body, bigger boots and darker jeans, and big ol' hands with scars on the fingers. Men's hands. Nails blunt and dirty with oil and grease and burning and- The cars were on fire. Paper burned and curled and rags ignited, the cement floor pockmarked by flash fires. Meat withered in her nose and she realized it was her. Him. Dancing embers blackened and burned bone. He screamed and she hoped she was not. He writhed and she really hoped she was not. He was dying, dead, and- — Angele Gougeon

And she could be depressed if she wanted to be, she could sit and watch Dogs with Jobs on the National Geographic Channel and eat her way through a packet of chocolate bourbon biscuits if she felt like it because nobody cared about her. In fact, she could sit there all day, from Barney and Friends to Porn Babes Laid Bare, with hours of the Landscape Channel in between, and eat the contents of an entire biscuit factory until she was an obese, earthbound balloon whose dead and bloated body would have to be hydraulically lifted from the house by a fire crew because nobody cared. — Kate Atkinson

I'm dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched: a man with a cane was crossing the street, a dull groan suddenly surged through the asphalt, the man stood still as if waiting for someone to repeat the question and then the earth opened up beneath his feet: it swallowed the man, and with him a car and a dog, all the oxygen around and even the screams of passers-by. I'm dead, Makina said to herself, and hardly had she said it than her whole body began to contest that verdict and she flailed her feet frantically backward, each step mere inches from the sinkhole, until the precipice settled into a perfect circle and Makina was saved. Slippery bitch of a city, she said to herself. Always about to sink back into the the cellar. — Yuri Herrera

Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don't know why. It lives, and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion. — Louise Erdrich

Everybody knows full well my passion about defeating Barack Obama. Over my dead body would I vote for Barack Obama. — Rick Santorum

Dead isn't angels or ghosts. It's a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body
so that they can return to their most elemental stage. — Jodi Picoult

Since I was dead - or worse than dead, buried alive in a body that might as well be a coffin except it denied me the pleasure of suffocation - I figured I should be allowed to grieve. — Robin Wasserman

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

Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into 'soul' and 'body' is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body ... Someone who accepts - as I myself do, taking it on trust - the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more 'scientifically' if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit. — Arnold Joseph Toynbee

I can tell you that she's not breathing," he said. "She has no heartbeat and all organ function and brain activity have stopped. Also her body temperature is now at seventy-three degrees."
"So you're saying that she's dead," I said.
"Well, I can't prove it, but, yes, I am leaning that way. — John Zakour

Angelic Sookie, vision of love and beauty, I am prostrate that the wicked evil maenad violated your smooth and voluptuous body, in an attempt to deliver a message to me. -Eric — Charlaine Harris

She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision. — D.H. Lawrence

Ye who amid this feverish world would wear A body free of pain, of cares a mind, Fly the rank city, shun its turbid air; Breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke And volatile corruption, from the dead, The dying, sickening, and the living world Exhal'd, to sully heaven's transparent dome With dim mortality. — John Armstrong

Would you be shedding tears for McNab's dead body if he'd been screwing around on you?"

Peabody pursed her lips. "Well, since I'd've been the one who killed him, I'd probably be shedding tears for me because you'd be arresting me. And that would really make me sad. — J.D. Robb

As the thing came closer, what was left of Nick's body became revealed and I could see how the dead boy's eyes had bled from the trauma inflicted upon him; they dripped with steady succession onto the floor between his splayed legs. He looked like a rejected marionette tossed haphazardly in the corner by a frustrated puppeteer, his head drooping so low that his chin rested against his chest. His motionless arms lay at his sides, both of them squeezed into tight fists, as if he'd died futilely trying to defend himself. — J. Tonzelli

Phoebe stared into his blue eyes. "What would you do if you ran away from a wedding in a car that didn't belong to you and discovered a body in the trunk about the time a sheriff's deputy rolled up behind you?" She flung her hand in the air, and assumed a high-pitched, sarcastic tone. "Hi, I'm a rich man's daughter with a dead man in my trunk. Could you help me get him out so I can be on my merry way? — Elle James

We are falling back into allegory," said the Captain, interrupting him. "If you mean by all that that the body is the most solid of realities, then say so."
"No, not exactly," Zeno explained. "This body, our kingdom, sometimes seems to me to be made of a fabric as loosely woven and as evanescent as a shadow. I should hardly be more astonished to see my mother again (who is dead) than to come upon you around a corner as I did, your face grown older and its substance recomposed more than once in twenty years' time, with its color altered by the seasons and its form somewhat changed, but your mouth still knowing my name. Think of the grain that has grown and the creatures that have lived and died in order to sustain that Henry who is and is not the one I knew twenty years ago. — Marguerite Yourcenar

She was in big trouble now.
"You stupid man," she said to the body on the floor. "Why did you have to lunge at me like that? Why couldn't you have left well enough alone? I told your father I wasn't going to marry you. I told him I wouldn't marry you if you were the last idiot in Britain."
She nearly stamped her foot in frustration. Why was it her words never came out quite the way she
intended them to?
"What I meant to say was that you are an idiot," she said to Percy, who, not
surprisingly, didn't respond, "and that I wouldn't marry you if you were the last man in Britain, and- Oh, blast. What am I doing talking to you, anyway? You're quite dead. — Julia Quinn

Compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust, ... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams ... — Mary Roach

Do you want to know something from the beyond? Do you want to chat with divine beings face to face? It is indispensable to enter into the region of the dead at will, to visit the celestial regions, to know other worlds of the infinite space. Outside of the physical body, one can give to himself the luxury of invoking beloved relatives who already passed through the doors of death. They will concur to our call, then we can personally chat with them ... When out of the physical body, we can acquire complete knowledge about the mysteries of death and life. Out of the physical body, we can invoke the angels in order to talk personally with them face to face. — Samael Aun Weor

Dead bodies do get a grayish blue/purple hue because blood pools in the capillaries and the body starts to decompose. It's not smurf blue, but it's not a pleasant shade. — Ann Hood

Beverly once read a science magazine article about bioluminescence, the natural glow emitted by organisms like fireflies and jellyfish, but she knows the dead also give off a strange illumination, a phosphor that can permanently damage the eyes of the living. Necroluminescence - the light of the vanished. A hindsight produced by the departed body. Your failings backlit by the death of your loved ones. — Karen Russell

There's a Bene Gesserit saying," she said. "You have sayings for everything!" he protested. "You'll like this one," she said. "It goes: 'Do not count a human dead until you've seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake. — Frank Herbert

There was no back home any more, not in the essential way, and that was part of Paris too. Why we couldn't stop drinking or talking or kissing the wrong people no matter what it ruined. Some of us had looked into the faces of the dead and tried not to remember anything in particular. Ernest was one of these. He often said he'd died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul had left his body like a silk handkerchief, slipping out and levitating over his chest. It had returned without being called back, and I often wondered if writing for him was a way of knowing his soul was there after all, back in its place. Of saying to himself, if not to anyone else, that he had seen what he'd seen and felt those terrible things and lived anyway. That he had died but wasn't dead any more. — Paula McLain

Well, do as you think best. That's every man's right and duty. But for me, I pledge you now I will not surrender one grain of my rights. What I took, I took and by God, I'll keep it, too. Take her home tomorrow, Archie, and never look back to watch what I do, for you know it before. I would not give him one knigh who had confided himself to me and none other, much less you. Only over my dead body," said Hotspur hardily, eye to eye with the friend he had made under Homildon Hill, "will King Henry ever claim you as his prisoner. — Edith Pargeter

In the midst of fear Lyra knelt by Lanre's body and breathed his name. Her voice was a beckoning. Her voice was love and longing. Her voice called him to live again. But Lanre lay cold and dead. — Patrick Rothfuss

What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain. — Jeanette Winterson

Agatha Christie never wrote books that just started with a dead body, and a 'Let's find out who the murderer is', which is kind of mysterious but not that mysterious. She always started with, 'How can this thing be happening; isn't it strange?' — Sophie Hannah

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern ... — Iris Murdoch

I know what I'm doing," he growled.
"If you knew what you were doing, we wouldn't have two million zombie bunnies chasing us!" she shouted.
"Guys," Daphne said, trying to get their attention, but her sister was too angry to listen.
"How was I supposed to know that kid was mentally unhinged?" Puck said.
"I don't know," Sabrina snapped. "Maybe when we found him running from a dead body?"
"Guys!" Daphne shouted.
"What!" Puck and Sabrina snapped.
"LOOK OUT! — Michael Buckley

Only my dead body would allow her to walk out that door." Warner exercises his jaw and spits blood on the floor.
"You, I would kill for pleasure," he says to Adam. "But Juliette is the one I want forever. — Tahereh Mafi