Death Rattle Quotes & Sayings

The words came from him like a sob, a hoarse sound like the death rattle of a dying man; it seemed indeed like the agony of death when the father's love was powerless. — Honore De Balzac

The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom. — Georg Buchner

The guard looked down at the scarlet bloodstains blooming on his chest. He appeared to think of something that he needed to say, but as his lips began to form the words, his knees gave up the strain of supporting his ruined bulk. He collapsed to the floor, his throat issuing a final sound like a bubbling casserole. — R.D. Ronald

That's not trouble; that's fail. Tell me that isn't all the whites. Like, Michael's and Shane's, too."
"All the whites," Claire said, and held up the guilty red sock. "Yours?"
"Oh, damn." Eve snatched it out of Claire's fingers and shook the sock like a floppy rattle. "Bad sock! Bad! You are never going anywhere fun ever again! — Rachel Caine

She look me over from head to foot. Then she cackle. Sound like a death rattle. You sure is ugly, she say, like she ain't believed it. — Alice Walker

Now all you need is to make a V with your hand and say in a death rattle that you have been and always shall be his friend," Ian noted with heavy irony.
"Why would I ... " I began. Then understanding dawned.
"Holy crap, you're a closet Trekkie! — Jeaniene Frost

Away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, from the town, burrowing among the dwellings of men and making the streets hum, flashing out into the meadows for a moment, mining in through the damp earth, booming on in darkness and heavy air, bursting out again into the sunny day so bright and wide; away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, through the fields, through the woods, through the corn, through the hay, through the chalk, through the mould, through the clay, through the rock, among objects close at hand and almost in the grasp, ever flying from the traveller, and a deceitful distance ever moving slowly with him: like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death! — Charles Dickens

We're so old that the winds of age echo along our ribs and pick at our eye sockets. We could be gone tomorrow. A chill, say, or a little slip on the cliff side. I feel as fragile as a dried flower. I rattle a little in the moving air, but I'm only coherent dust-a shape of what once was. My essence is going. — Sheri S. Tepper

What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifle's rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells,
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes,
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall,
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each, slow dusk a drawing down of blinds. — Wilfred Owen

Moriarty rarely smiled,and then usually to terrify some poor victim. The first time I heard him laugh, I thought he had been struck by a deadly poison and the stutter escaping through his locked jaws was a death rattle. — Kim Newman

Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel the cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. — Henry David Thoreau

The only sound I'd like to hear from a Motivational Speaker is a death rattle — Dean Cavanagh

What did grown men see in the rattle of sticks, the slashing of steel over ice and hockey sweaters worn way beyond funk? — Steve Vernon

I regarded the pumpkin thief's worst nightmare: splotchy coat, tattered ears, sleeping death rattle. "He gums robbers to death?" I asked. "What if they bring biscuits? — Joan Bauer

Ariel spoke Tybalt's line: "'Have at thee, coward!'"
"Save yer breath for a pretty death rattle. — Lisa Mantchev

Poems On Life:
Life is given to us,
we earn it by giving it.
Let the dead have the immortality of fame,
but the living the immortality of love.
Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty
that can modulate their isolation into a
harmony with the whole.
Life, like a child, laughs,
shaking its rattle of death as it runs. — Rabindranath Tagore

Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign - a kind of death-rattle - when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them. — John Brunner

Violence in the voice is often only the death rattle of reason in the throat. — Henry George Bohn

The Iron Throne is mine by rights. All those who deny that are my foes."
"The whole of the realm denies it, brother," said Renley. "Old men deny it with their death rattle, and unborn children deny it in their mothers' wombs. They deny it in Dorne and they deny it on the Wall. No one wants you for their king. Sorry. — George R R Martin

My last album as J. Tillman, 'Singing Ax,' that was really a premeditated death rattle of the aesthetic precedent I had set. I realized I wasn't creating spontaneously; I was enforcing all these parameters. I was too self-loathing or something, and there was this obvious dissonance between my conversational voice and creative voice. — J. Tillman

Within the hierarchy of fabrications that compose our lives - families, countries, gods - the self incontestably ranks highest. Just below the self is the family, which has proven itself more durable than national or ethnic affiliations, with these in turn outranking god-figures for their staying power. So any progress toward the salvation of humankind will probably begin from the bottom - when our gods have been devalued to the status of refrigerator magnets or lawn ornaments. Following the death rattle of deities, it would appear that nations or ethnic communities are next in line for the boneyard. Only after fealty to countries, gods, and families has been shucked off can we even think about coming to grips with the least endangered of fabrications - the self. — Thomas Ligotti

As far as plans went, it was like facing the zombie apocalypse with a nail file and a bag of Skittles. It might work, but chances were good that I'd die a horrible, painful death.
At least the end would be filled with fruity, candy goodness. And for my dramatic death scene I could whisper, in a creepy, quivery death rattle, taste the rainbow. Boy would those zombies be confused. — E.J. Stevens