Dead Theme Quotes & Sayings

I who was a house full of bowel movement,
I who was a defaced altar,
I who wanted to crawl toward God
could not move nor eat bread. — Anne Sexton

The new French theme park based on Napoleon is named Napoleon's Bivouac, and will honor Napoleon with rides, battle reenactments, and the brutal March on Moscow ride. That's a walk-in freezer you stand in for 18 months while you try to eat a dead horse. — Peter Sagal

The trees change their voices in autumn as well as their shapes. No longer do they whisper to one another in muffled tones as they did in summer; they talk in a different leaf-language now. The wind moves through the boughs like fingers drawn across the strings of a harp filling the air with the harsh dry sound of sapless leaves. It is the main theme of the autumn music, this murmuring counterpoint of dead leaves. — Patience Strong

A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be ... — Marcel Proust

His sculpture would have joy in it, try to capture the sense of fertility of Dionysus, the nature god, the power of the intoxicating drink that enabled a man to laugh and sing and forget for a while the sorrow of his earthly miseries. And then, perhaps, at the same time he could portray the decay that came with too much forgetfulness, that he saw all around him, when man surrendered his moral and spiritual values for the pleasures of the
flesh. The Bacchus would be the central figure of his theme, a human being rather than a demigod; then there would be a child of about seven, sweet-
faced, lovable, nibbling from a bunch of grapes. His composition would have death in it too; the tiger, who liked wine and was loved by Bacchus, with the deadest, dead skin and head conceivable — Irving Stone

But, if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son. — Larry McMurtry

Vanessa Rey chose the words for her own headstone, taking her theme from the Bhagavad Gita. "Certain is death, for the living, certain is life, for the dead." Think about that. — Mike Carey

by listening with full attention, by acknowledging his feelings with a word, by giving a name to his feelings, and by granting him his wishes in fantasy. — Adele Faber

When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort. But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams. — Thomas Lynch

For I thought there was a relation between God and the soul as yet unknown. On this theme the mind can reason to a point, a dead, impassable wall; arrived there, all that remains is to stand and cry aloud for help. — Lew Wallace

The anchor man thrown overboard has simply rooted us in history's repeating cycle — Saul Williams

The hurricanes are following the tropical ocean temperature. The tropical ocean temperature is following the Northern Hemisphere. And it's very hard now to believe that there's anything natural about that. — Kerry Emanuel

I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows ... Or it would be fine to confirm the odd beliefs about war: it's horrible, but it's a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you.
But, still, none of these notions seems right. Men are killed, dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and often brave, drill sergeants are boors, some men think the war is proper and just and others don't and most don't care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?
Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories. — Tim O'Brien

Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... " No. If this notion were real, he needn't make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. ("Novelty") — John Crowley

There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution — Frederick Douglass

As I look back on my fondness for the outdoors, and specifically the elements in nature that I find visually stimulating, I am surprised at how often the theme of dead trees arise. I guess it's that each one seems to have a story of its own, representing many years of living through everything that nature could throw at them. — Cory Trepanier

Some individuals are better able than others to draw the right conclusions about the world about them and act accordingly. These individuals will be more likely to survive and reproduce so their pattern of behaviour and thought will become dominant — Stephen Hawking

I've been frozen solid against the wall in Mazzo's, staring at my index finger for a couple of hours, when my dead brother Morton shows up. He does that literally. I mean, I look down on one side and see him coming up through the floor. Nothing special about that. People have been showing up through the floor all evening. They pop up and mushroom in bursts, clumps of people that explode and disappear. In the Mazzo theme park it's another of those acid nights. — John David Morley

To me, rap music is bigger than who's the coolest rapper, the biggest rapper. It's everything about your personality. — Diplo

It is not widely known that in the end, 65 per cent of the church leaders were informers for us, and the rest of them were under surveillance anyhow. — Anna Funder

Our northern brethren buried their dead, were skilled toolmakers, kept fires going, and took care of the infirm just like early humans. The fossil record shows survival into adulthood of individuals afflicted with dwarfism, paralysis of the limbs, or the inability to chew. Going by exotic names such as Shanidar I, Romito 2, the Windover Boy, and the Old Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, our ancestors supported individuals who contributed little to society. Survival of the weak, the handicapped, the mentally retarded, and others who posed a burden is seen by paleontologists as a milestone in the evolution of compassion. This communitarian heritage is crucial in relation to this book's theme, since it suggests that morality predates current civilizations and religions by at least a hundred millennia. — Frans De Waal

George had sent him a handful of postcards over the last two months. The front of each of them had borne a photograph of the idyllic Scottish countryside. And on the back, a series of messages circling a single theme:
Bored.
So bored.
Kill me now.
Too late, already dead. — Cassandra Clare

All those mounted heads in the living room," said Jane. "And he ends up hanging, like some dead animal. I'd say we've got a theme going here. — Tess Gerritsen

We have to bring our imaginations to bear on a story if we are to see all it's possibilitiess; otherwise it's just about somebody who did something. Whatever we take away from stories in the way of significance, symbolism, theme, meaning, pretty much anything except character and plot, we discover because our imagination engages with that of the author. Pretty amazing when you consider that the author may have been dead for thousands of years, yet we can still have this exchange, this dialogue, with her. — Thomas C. Foster

History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The common theme here was contempt: a poisonous disregard for human life. For Vladimir Putin's critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead. — Luke Harding

The Aunts put their arms about one another so that their faces were cheek to cheek, and from this doublehead they gazed up at Steerpike with a row of four equidistant eyes. There was no reason why there should not have been forty, or four hundred of them. It so happened that only four had been removed from a dead and endless frieze whose inexhaustible and repetitive theme was forever, eyes, eyes, eyes. — Mervyn Peake