Death Button Quotes & Sayings

I've already got the storm figured out. Some idiot blew up the sun. Some dumb Russian general pushed the wrong button and launched one of their million missiles, or maybe NASA misaimed one of our test rockets. Either way, the sun is gone and we're now engaged in a nuclear shootout. It's the end of everything. Batman and Superman aren't coming and James Bond doesn't have a trick up his sleeve to save us this time. In a week or a month, we'll all freeze to death, just like in that Twilight Zone episode where the pretty lady is burning up with fever, dreaming the sun is baking the world dry, when really the Earth has dropped out of orbit, is hurtling further and further away from the sun, rapidly turning into a big ball of ice. — Bob Thurber

I wait, washed, brushed, fed, like a prize pig. Sometime in the eighties they invented pig balls, for pigs who were being fattened in pens. Pig balls were large colored balls; the pigs rolled them around with their snouts. The pig marketers said this improved their muscle tone; the pigs were curious, they liked having something to think about. I read about that in Introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who'd give themselves electric shocks for something to do. And the one on the pigeons trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first one got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They'd peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked?
I wish I had a pig ball. — Margaret Atwood

We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church. — Thomas Jefferson

I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn't know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn't care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather's family had been taken from him and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn't have a dad. And how I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling down house and crying hot stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy year old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom. — Ransom Riggs

As far as I can see, the biggest decision you've got to make is which color lacy panties to let him peel of of you. — Courtney Hunt

Some people hate funerals. I find them comforting. They hit the pause button on life and remind us that it has an end. Every eulogy reminds me to deepen my dash, that place on the tombstone between our birth and our death. — Regina Brett

'You are your" "Past, Present," "& Future,' he said" " 'You divide into" "those components" "in this room' " " 'But I do not have" "components!' " "our three voices said," " 'My
secret name - " "Time's secret name" "is Oneness," "is One Thing' " "As I - the one" "in the middle - spoke," "the one of us in front - " "who was the Past - " "had already" "finished speaking" "& was awaiting" "his reply" "He said," " 'Don't we seem" "to experience" "things
somewhat this way?" "There is past, present" :& future' " "The Future then cried out," " 'Where is my life?" 'Where is my life?" "You have stolen" "my life!' " "There was a silence" "The man" "reached out &" "pressed a button" "on the cave wall - " "we three united" "into
one again" "while he wrote words on" "a clipboard" "Then he looked up & said," " 'Going forward?" "Going on?" "Death lies ahead, you know' " "Any woman" "may already" "be dead,' " "I said — Alice Notley

An endless array of teddy bears and stuffed animals, plastic clowns and porcelain dolls, hang on the branches from webby rope. In the human realm, we call them love-worn and threadbare
playthings that were hugged and kissed by a child until the stuffing fell out or the button eyes popped off. Toys that were loved to death. — A.G. Howard

In that same year, NYU conducted its own study. With rats. They implanted electrodes in the brains of male rats and put two buttons in their cages. When the lucky little bastards pushed the blue button, the electrodes triggered an orgasm. When they pushed a red button, they were given food.
Care to guess what happened to all the rats?
They died.
They fucking starved to death.
They never pushed the red button.
Need I say more? — Emma Chase

It's the cemetery where my father is already buried. "Great," I say. "Just make sure you leave your forwarding address." I hold the keypad away from my ear and punch the pound button. "Got another call coming in," I lie. "At this hour?" "It's an escort service," I joke. "I don't like to keep Peaches waiting . . ." "You're going to be the death of me, Leo," my mother says with a sigh. "Sons of Abraham Cemetery. Got it," I say. "I love you, Ma." "I loved you first," she replies. "So what am I supposed to tell my podiatrist about Irene?" "If she keeps wearing heels she'll wind — Jodi Picoult

Incredible in retrospect, all of it, but especially the parts having to do with travel and communications. This was how he arrived in this airport: he'd boarded a machine that transported him at high speed a mile above the surface of the earth. This was how he'd told Miranda Carroll of her ex-husband's death: he'd pressed a series of buttons on a device that had connected him within seconds to an instrument on the other side of the world, and Miranda - barefoot on a white sand beach with a shipping fleet shining before her in the dark - had pressed a button that had connected her via satellite to New York. These taken-for-granted miracles that had persisted all around them. — Emily St. John Mandel

Squeaker and the Colonel were aware that death had visited them in their home, she'd come swaggering in on spike heels, and with a big noise had removed one of their number, from the world of the living to that other place where all one's batteries were run down flat and the light behind one's button eyes went out. — K.W. Jeter

Death is not complete annihilation. It is a pause. It is like pressing the pause button on a tape recorder. — Mata Amritanandamayi

Young Egyptians, gazing through the windows of the Internet, have gained a keener sense than many of their elders of the freedoms and opportunities they lack. They have found in social media a way to interact and share ideas, bypassing, in virtual space, the restrictions placed on physical freedom of assembly. — Mohamed ElBaradei

Life is impermanent and in the face of that impermanence, cavort! Look death in the eye, tell him you're as cute as a button, flash a little deviant guile his way, and tell him to go feast on somebody's else's sweet flesh. — Nancy Milford

She wondered how people would remember her. She had not made enough to spread her wealth around like Carnegie, to erase any sins that had attached to her name, she had failed, she had not reached the golden bough. The liberals would cheer her death. They would light marijuana cigarettes and drive to their sushi restaurants and eat fresh food that had traveled eight thousand miles. They would spend all of supper complaining about people like her, and when they got home their houses would be cold and they'd press a button on a wall to get warm. The whole time complaining about big oil. — Philipp Meyer

A button machine makes buttons, no matter what the power used, foot, steam or electricity. They, no matter what the motivating force, death, love or God, made jokes. — Nathanael West

Well what would you have us do, Jason? Swan into a hardware store without any cash and say "give us your best rack or we'll set the adorable button-nosed robots on you for bunny-boiler death by cuddling?" Jared Thomas in Red Gods Sing — Trevor Barton

In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which displayed collections of minerals in a kind of closet or chamber which would, at the push of a button, darken. Then ultraviolet lights would begin to glow and the minerals would seem to come alive, new colors, new possibilities, and architectures revealed. Plain stones became fantastic, "futuristic ... " Of course there wasn't any black light in the center of the earth, in the caves where they were quarried; how strange that these stones should have to be brought here, bathed with this unnatural light in order for their transcendent characters to emerge. Irradiation revealed a secret aspect of the world.
Imagine illness as this light; demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible. — Mark Doty

In all seriousness, Archer claims that if you, as a living, alive person, hear the song "You're the One That I Want" from the musical Grease three times in a single day - seemingly by accident, whether in an elevator, on a radio, a telephone hold button, or whatever - it indicates that you'll surely die before sunset. — Chuck Palahniuk

We stood up on two legs
And raised our heads above golden grass
He was there

We sharpened stone and steel
Used tools to harvest grass, beast and brother
He was there

We clustered together
In brick and mud swarming with rats and plague
He was there

We built nations and mistrust
Our fingers hovered over the red button
He smiled

Still we build
To rise above the golden grass
Away from the reach of his scythe

When he will harvest no more — Tim Seeley

Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live. — Pema Chodron

If you die in an elevator, be sure to push the up button. — Sam Levenson

A lot of people don't listen to the albums. They just listen to the singles. — Joe Perry

And the one on the pigeons, trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They'd peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked? — Margaret Atwood

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder. — Don DeLillo

I'm supposed to trust you?"
"No," he said. He picked up the phone. "Put her sister on." A second later he
handed the small silver device to her.
Summer felt a second of panic - after all, this tiny piece of metal and circuitry
unlocked doors, turned off death traps and blew up houses. God knows what would
happen if she pushed the wrong button. — Anne Stuart

So, like the knights of old, I suited up in my trusty intern armor - brownish-green suit, sensible cap-toed oxfords, white button-down, and omnipresent LensCrafters glasses. If I wasn't able to shoot her, I could probably bore her to death. — Shane Kuhn

She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. — Richard Russo