Missing Dead Ones Quotes & Sayings

I stepped out to the lawn. I remember the air that night, and how it was so brisk that it could revive the dead. The fragrance of eucalyptus stoking a home fire, the smell of wet grass, of dung fuel, of tobacco, of swamp air, and the perfume of hundreds of roses
this was the scent of Missing. No, it was the scent of a continent. — Abraham Verghese

Lena is sure that other people don't have many selves. She is terrified that she doesn't have a core self, an essential Lena. She feels that she used to but that she lost it along the way, that at some point it became buried, suffocated, and died, because when she looks beneath the chattering of the selves, nothing is there. Maybe the fractured feeling is taking hold because something is dead inside her, or missing. — Haley Tanner

We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: "You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl." He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn't believe anyone. The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. "She should at least have fingers," I thought. "She's a girl. — Svetlana Alexievich

You called?" Sounding casual is difficult when it feels like you're heart's river-dancing in your rib cage.
"Yes. I just wondered where you were. You didn't answer your cell. Is everything okay?" She sighs, but I can't tell if it's in relief or parental aggravation.
"Everything's fine. My battery is dead, but Galen bought me a charger to keep over here, so it's charging."
"How sweet of him," she says, knowing good and well she instructed him to do so. "Well, just wanted to check in. Should I wait up for you? I don't appreciate you missing curfew the last few nights. Technically, staying over there until four in the morning is a coed sleepover, which I don't allow, or had you forgotten? Your trip to Florida with Galen's family was a special circumstance."
"I stayed the night at Chloe's all the time with JJ there." JJ is Chloe's eight-year-old brother. Not a great comeback, but it will have to do. — Anna Banks

Braith opened her eyes and screamed at what hovered above her, "Gods! Death comes for me!"
The horrifying face of death curled its lip at her and growled, "Well, that's charmin'." Death sat back in its chair, hands resting on its knees. "This face is not me fault, ya know?" Death looked off, thought a moment. Its finger traced one of the deep gouges across its jaw. "This one actually is kind of me fault." She pointed at the other side of her face, where part of her chin was missing. "And this one. A bit of barney at the pub."
...
"That was not death," he whispered. "That was our Great-Aunt Brigida."
"Brigida? Brigida the Foul?" He nodded. "I thought she was dead."
Addolgar shook his head and whispered, "She just won't die. — G.A. Aiken

I was just laying aside a Lausanne paper I'd bought in Zurich when my eye was caught by a report that said the remains of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier, seventy-two years later. And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots. — W.G. Sebald

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum. — Amy Lowell

There were no more heroes. Kennedy was dead, shot by an assassin in Dallas. Batman and Robin were dead... Superman was missing... — Robert Mayer

When someone is missing the really hard thing is that you never really do give up hope, even though the inquest says that she is dead, even though right from the beginning we already knew that we wouldn't see her again. — Jackie French

And here we have six missing Death Eaters ... three dead in my service. One, too cowardly to return ... he will pay. One, who I believe has left me for ever ... he will be killed, of course ... and one who remains my most faithful servant, and who has already re-entered my service. — J.K. Rowling

Matt looked up kids from his high school class. Only three were listed as dead, but a bunch were listed as missing/presumed dead. As a test, he looked us up, but none of our names were on any of the lists. And that's how we know we're alive this Memorial Day. — Susan Beth Pfeffer

The dead aren't the only ones who vanish: you, too, can disappear in plain sight if enough is taken from you. I was still missing, in many ways. And I wasn't sure I wanted to be found. — Sarah Dessen

Freddie will have been dead for 20 years in November. I was staggered because it doesn't seem possible that all that time has passed and I still miss him. He was my best friend, my best man. We shared so much and I owe so much to him. — Roger Meddows Taylor

Dead bodies didn't resemble unconscious ones; it was as if you could sense that something had fled from them, that some essential spark was now missing. — Cassandra Clare

He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to. — Ian McEwan

Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this. — Stephen King

I looked where he was tapping.
"Local Girl Missing, Feared Dead"
Beneath it was a photo or me-my most recent school photo. "Oh no." My heart filling with dread, i took the paper from Mr. Smith's hands. "Couldn't they have found a better picture? — Meg Cabot

It wasn't that I didn't understand Jeremy getting a new band while I was missing/dead/etc. I was sure I would have done the same thing in his position. Well, I would have started one, not joined one, because I don't really like team sports unless I've invented both the team and the sport. — Maggie Stiefvater

Clem is my first dead body. I've heard again and again - mostly from friends who've lost other friends to AIDS - that it's essential to see the corpse of someone you love, especially someone who's died undeservedly young; how it will confirm the way nothing else can that he or she is no longer here. The body won't look like the person you know, the self of that person, at all. This tells you there has to be a soul because something's missing; what else could that something be? The first thing I know, when I see her, isthat this is not a piece of advice I will ever pass on. — Julia Glass

God isn't dead--he's just missing in action. — Phil Ochs

People are bored. They're dead! Go to a shopping mall and check out the faces. I did this for years - I'd drive out to the malls on weekends and just sit there watching people, trying to figure it out. What's missing? What do they need? What's the next step? And then I got it: imagination. We've lost the ability to make things up. We've farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us. — Jennifer Egan

Cowell Devlin sighed. Yes, he understood Anna Wetherell at long last, but it was not a happy understanding. Devlin had known many women of poor prospects and limited means, whose only transport out of the miserable cage of their unhappy circumstance was the flight of the fantastic. Such fantasies were invariably magical - angelic patronage, invitations into paradise - and Anna's story, touching though it was, showed the same strain of the impossible. Why, it was painfully clear! The most eligible bachelor of Anna's acquaintance possessed a love so deep and pure that all respective differences between them were rendered immaterial? He was not dead - he was only missing? He was sending her 'messages' that proved the depth of his love - and these were messages that only she could hear? It was a fantasy, Devlin thought. It was a fantasy of the girl's own devising. The boy could only be dead. — Eleanor Catton

It was as if the demise of the owner had lent the flat a physical void it hadn't had before. At the same time he had the feeling that he wasn't alone. Harry believed in the existence of the soul. Not that he was particularly religious as such, but it was one thing which always struck him when he saw a dead body: the body was bereft of something ... the creature had gone, the light had gone,there was not the illusory afterglow that long-since burned-out stars have. The body was missing its soul and it was the absence of the soul that made Harry believe. — Jo Nesbo

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on. — Ray Bradbury

He was part of us and when he died all the actions stopped dead, and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. i've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million actions the night he passed on. — Ray Bradbury

Remember, life is always uncertain. Everything dead is certain, life is always uncertain. Everything dead is solid, fixed - its nature cannot be changed; everything alive is moving, changing - a flow, a liquid thing, flexible, able to move in any direction. The more you become certain, the more you will miss life. And those who know, know life is God. If you miss life, you miss God. — Rajneesh

She saw it all so clearly. Her starving mother, her missing father. Kommunisten. Her dead brother. — Markus Zusak

And oh, god, how could so much regret and so much sweetness and so much sadness all be present in that single moment. I was already dead and missing my unlived life. I was already dead and Tobias was mourning.
I tried to smile. For him. — Katherine Applegate

I never win anything," Dolorous Edd complained. "The gods always smiled on Watt, though. When the wildlings knocked him off the Bridge of Skulls, somehow he landed in a nice depp proof of water. How lucky was that, missing all those rocks?"
"Was it a long fall?" Green wanted to know. "Did landing in the pool of water save his life?"
"No," said Dolorous Edd. "He was dead already, from that axe in his head. Still, it was pretty lucky, missing the rocks. — George R R Martin

Forgive me if I don't take relationship advice from a dead teenager missing her vagina. — Brian K. Vaughan

I'm so much happier now that I'm dead. Technically missing. Soon to be presumed dead. Gone. And my lazy lying shitting oblivious husband will go to prison for my murder. Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That's murder. Let the punishment fit the crime. — Gillian Flynn

The magnificent thing about her [Amelia Earhart] is, in the eyes of the world, she simply never died. Her fear never witnessed, her failure never recorded, her shiny twin-engine Electra never recovered. Earhart's legacy of inspiration is amplified because her adventure is perpetual. We don't think of her as dead; we think of her as missing. She is forever flying, somewhere beyond Lae, over that limitless blue horizon. — Josh Gates

Wrote the name and serial number of each prisoner in a big, red ledger. Everybody was legally alive now. Before they got their names and numbers in that book, they were missing in action and probably dead. So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut

A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong. You cannot, by tying an opinion, to a man's tongue, make him the representative of that opinion; and at the close of any battle for principles, his name will be found neither among the dead nor among the wounded, but among the missing. — Edwin Percy Whipple