Death From Novels Quotes & Sayings

I stood my ground, staring straight into his eyes. "You didn't do anything to me. Since when is sex so life or death to you?" -Abby Abernathy
"Since it was with you!" -Travis Maddox — Jamie McGuire

Her face was as red as her hair. "What are you doing," she cried.
Devon put a question mark next to the sentence. "Editing your paper." What did it look like he was doing?
"You're just cutting out stuff!"
"What do you think editing is? — M.M. John

I felt suffocated. And alone. More alone than ever. Every year, I ostentatiously crossed out of my address book any friend who'd made a racist remark, neglected those whose only ambition was a new car and a Club Med vacation, and forgot all those who played the Lottery. I loved fishing and silence. Walking the hills. Drinking cold Cassis, Lagavulin, or Oban late into the night. I didn't talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I'd stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people. — Jean-Claude Izzo

Literature is a source of pleasure, he said, it is one of the rare inexhaustible joys in life, but it's not only that. It must not be disassociated from reality. Everything is there. That is why I never use the word fiction. Every subtlety in life is material for a book. He insisted on the fact. Have you noticed, he'd say, that I'm talking about novels? Novels don't contain only exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest to the most wretched. There are books where, as you read, you wonder: What would I have done? It's a question you have to ask yourself. Listen carefully: it is a way to learn to live. There are grown-ups who would say no, that literature is not life, that novels teach you nothing. They are wrong. Literature performs, instructs, it prepares you for life. — Laurence Cosse

The reality of his predicament hit him hard. There's no way out of this now, save arrest or death. Professor Ratib had made it sound so academic, but it wasn't. Regardless of whether we're attacking human- or infrastructure-related targets, it's terrorism. If Husam thinks that I'm a risk, I'm dead. — Christian F. Burton

I will not stand by and let any man believe his death is an act of one of the gods. They don't deserve the credit. This is just nature, a side effect of mortality - H — Katie Hamstead

When I die I hope it may be said:
'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'. — Shannon L. Alder

I love you, Jocelyn, and nothing, not even death, will ever keep me away from you. — J.L. Sheppard

Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale. — Kate Atkinson

Shut your eyes," said Miss Tanner.
"Oh no," said Miranda, "for then I see worse things ... — Katherine Anne Porter

Give me agony or give me death,
I'll take thy heart as eternal breath — Nely Cab

Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be: if you were afraid your plane would crash it was about death, if you were trying to get a girl into bed it was about sex. Literature was never about what it appeared to be about, though in the case of the novel cosiderable ingenuity and perception were needed to crack the code of realistic illusion, which was why he had been professionally attracted to the genre (even the dumbest critic understood that Hamlet wasn't about how the guy wanted to kill his uncle, or the Ancient Mariner about cruelty to animals, but it was surprising how many people thought Jane Austen's novels were about finding Mr Right). — David Lodge

My death granted immortality.
With one look, I knew he'd be my undoing ... Forgotten, book #1 of the Fate Trilogy — Sarah J. Pepper

She went slowly along Theobald's Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, where it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer that most women thought. — Ian McEwan

When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy-girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street ... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death ... And they should! ... For they are in life. — Roman Payne

Alexandre Dumas wrote those lines when he had just turned forty-five and had decided it was time to reflect on his life. He never got past chronicling his thirty-first year - which was well before he had published a word as a novelist - yet he spent more than the first two hundred pages on a story that is as fantastic as any of his novels: the life of his father, General Alexandre - Alex - Dumas, a black man from the colonies who narrowly survived the French Revolution and rose to command fifty thousand men. The chapters about General Dumas are drawn from reminiscences of his mother and his father's friends, and from official documents and letters he obtained from his mother and the French Ministry of War. It is a raw and poignant attempt at biography, full of gaps, omissions, and re-creations of scenes and dialogue. But it is sincere. The story of his father ends with this scene of his death, the point at which the novelist begins his own life story. — Tom Reiss

Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations. One theologian suggested that Springsteen's 'Tunnel of Love' album, in which he symbolically sings of sin, death, despair and redemption, is more important for Catholics than the Pope's last visit when he spoke of morality only in doctrinal propositions. — Brennan Manning

I never liked the influence of others when it came to feelings. I rather went through the painful process of analyzing everything half to death. — Erika M. Szabo

A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie. — Nikita Dudani

Heavy hearts, heavy eyelids," said the master of the caravan.
"Huh?" Heather looked up in dismay, shocked to find she'd nearly been left behind as the caravan prepared to move on. Her last night's sleep had been fitful, full of dreams where Khalid made her suffer for running away. Now she felt drained and groggy, unable to get the images of Khalid spanking her over his knee and then ravishing her out of her tired head.
"Look," the caravan master said. "Riders approaching, a great armed party. No doubt they are searching for escaped slaves."
"No doubt." Heather straightened up wearily in the saddle, determined to outwit Khalid and conceal her true identity as a runaway. The one thing she was sure of was that capture would bring a fate worse than death. Already she could imagine Khalid tying her up, spanking her bottom, making her howl for mercy until she had no pride or will to resist. And then would come the true test of her virtue ... — Patricia Grasso

Second, the reason to embrace and celebrate these novels as the countercultural event that they are is due largely to the subliminal messages delivered by Harry and friends in their stolen wheelbarrows. Readers walk away, maybe a little softer on the occult than they were, but with story-embedded messages: the importance of a pure soul; love's power even over death; about sacrifice and loyalty; a host of images and shadows about Christ and how essential 'right belief' is for personal transformation and victory over internal and external evils. — John Granger

Because Dad told you he'd be here forever.
Because I thought forever was like Mars -- far away. — Kwame Alexander

---Sleeps through the washes of the morning's colors and the warm brilliance of sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perfectly, every detail about her husband, this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open and she wonders how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before. — Ashley Hay

Of course not. No one is chosen. Not ever. Not in the real world. You chose to climb out of your window and ride on a leopard. You chose to get a witch's Spoon back, and to make friends with a wyvern. You chose to trade your shadow for a child's life. You chose not to let the Marquess hurt your friend
you chose to smash her cages! You chose to face your own Death, not to balk at a great sea to cross and no ship to cross it in. And twice now you have chosen not to go home when you might have, if only you abandoned your friends. You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you
you chose yourself. You could have had a lovely holiday in Fairyland and never met the Marquess, never worried yourself with local politics, had a romp with a few brownies and gone home with enough memories for a lifetime's worth of novels. But you didn't. You chose. You chose it all. Just like you chose your path on the beach: to lose your heart is not a path for the faint and fainting. — Catherynne M Valente

We are just too blinded by the phrase, "grow old together" and learning its meaning from hopeless movies and novels that glorify undying love and unbelievable understanding. Don't you think?
Reality is...
Love dies. People change. And we grow old together in present. Today, tomorrow, and every day after that.
It's not about eternity. It's not till death do us part.
It's about today. This day. And I believe only in today.
So, come! Let's grow old together today! — Mansi Laus Deo

Well, nothing's a life or death struggle anymore, is it? The era of honor and sacrifice is over." I looked again at the O'Brian novels, lined up in order. "Jack Aubrey's full of human failings - so's Maturin - but they have principles, and they'd give their lives for them. Or for each other. Now it's all about money and status and celebrity. Not that people haven't always cared about those things, but it used to be considered venal, didn't it?" I shrugged. "It's like nobody bothers to grow up anymore. We just want to be kids all our lives. Collecting toys, having fun. — Beatriz Williams

Boredom has been used as a technique, it is a device. In Zen, boredom is used as a device: you are bored to death, and you are not allowed to escape. You are not to go outside, you are not to entertain yourself, you are not to do, you are not to talk, you are not to read novels and detective stories. No thrill. No possibility to escape anywhere. — Rajneesh

When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book's plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body of flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot, makes it less fearful by containing it in a kind of game format. [from an interview with DeCurtis] — Don DeLillo

Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way. — Cormac McCarthy

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place. Certainly, the convention existed well before the age of the tape recorder and the wiretap. Not on the phone, in a spy or mystery story, has always been, in and of itself, sufficient to hold up the resolution of the case for a long, long time. — Renata Adler

FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER. FEAR IS THE LITTLE-DEATH THAT BRINGS TOTAL OBLITERATION. — Frank Herbert

He couldn't begin his morning writing session until his writing implements and the bric-a-brac on his desk (including an indispensable figurine of two frogs dueling with swords) were perfectly disposed, but in thirty-five years of writing to deadline - all his novels were written as weekly or monthly serials - he missed a deadline only once, and then only because he was stunned by Mary Hogarth's death. — Robert Garnett

although we move forward through a story, the entire story is already complete - we hold it in our hands. In this sense, fiction, the great life-giver, also kills, not just because people often die in novels and stories but, more important, because, even if they don't die, they have already happened. Fictional form is always a kind of death, in the way that Blanchot described actual life. "Was. We say he is, then suddenly he was, this terrible was." That is the narrator of Thomas Bernhard's novel "The Loser," describing his friend Wertheimer, who has committed suicide. But it might also describe the tense in which we encounter most fictional lives: we say, "She was," not "She is." He left the house, she rubbed her neck, she put down her book and went to sleep. — James Wood

In the forensics novels the contents of a victim's pockets on the night of her death Say Something about her character. My Ford's Theatre ticket stub and Jimmy Carter key chain say that I am the corniest, goody-goody person in town. Luckily, I survived the evening unscathed so no one will ever find out about that losery Jimmy Carter key chain. — Sarah Vowell

Death was confused. "That's senseless! I am the doorway to eternity. — Mary Ann D'Alto

I peered down the alleyways and into the darkest corners. That Donovan song, 'Try and Catch the Wind', kept playing over-and-over in my head. The odor of dried fish filled the air. I breathed in deeply and smiled. I felt that God, evil, and even death were all very near, but I wasn't afraid. I didn't want to miss a single moment. — Richard Cezar

I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things
like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.)
I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels.
Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't! — Terri Windling

I'm talking about those novels where the characters aren't really interesting and you don't care about them or anything they care about. It's those books I won't read anymore. There's too much else to read
books about people and things that matter, books about life and death. — Will Schwalbe

Death, everyone fears it in one way or another but when I stood in front of it myself, face to face, I felt no fear. — Atarah L. Poling

Cinema is a mixed form. L'Avventura has characters, it has social context, and these things are not trivial. Its plot is the disappearance of a disappearance. Possibly the most frightening plot imaginable. Forgetting the dead, whom all of history tells us we must remember. But what makes movies themselves, rather than novels or plays, is something else. What is it if not the film medium itself? The purity of the visual, which lies in the silence of the stilled image. The freeze frame. The deeply, deeply silent image. Like death. The image in itself in its silent purity reaches
it reaches!
for the purity of death. — Frank Lentricchia

Like the roller coaster of life ... novels aren't fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop. — Carmen DeSousa