Seems Dead Quotes & Sayings

In America, they are paranoid about ruining the reputations of people once they are dead and cannot answer back. They have this fascination which to me seems cruel and morbid. I do not want any part of it. — Isabella Rossellini

I have always said,
on the birth of dreams,
That they must form wings and spread.
For there is no sadder sight it seems,
Than that of dreams that are dead.

Trygvie Jensen — Trygvie Jensen

Just inside the doorway he puts down the bags, motions her to stand by them a minute. He saunters out ahead, carefully casual. Peers up one way, down the other. Nothing. The street's dead to the world.
Then suddenly, from nowhere, ping! Something flicks off the wall just behind him, flops at his feet like a dead bug. He doesn't bend down to look closer, he can tell what kind of a bug it is all right. He's seen that kind of bug before, plenty of times. No flash, no report, to show which direction it came from. Silencer, of course.
He hasn't moved. Fsssh! and a bee or wasp in a hurry strokes by his cheek, tingles, draws a drop of slow blood. Another pokk! from the wall, another bug rolling over. The insect-world seems very streamlined, very self-destructive, tonight. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity, - the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heavens artillery, - but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggots life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear od death, of God, of the universe, comes over him, - the hope of the Resurrection and the life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence, - it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.
- The White Silence — Jack London

Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?
In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?
Or is the use its life? — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling - it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful. — James Salter

He is looking down at her peaceful, rigid face fading into the dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf. — William Faulkner

I'm beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead. — Helen Humphreys

Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure. — Marcel Duchamp

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts ... it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us. — Henrik Ibsen

According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where "survivors envy the dead," which seems true only when I look at Twitter. Yet — Chuck Klosterman

"Someone called him. Someone who seems to have set the whole things up, someone who knew me, my name." I looked at Liam. "Who is it?"
He choked on a laugh. "Seriously? I just died. Your boyfriend there killed me. You really expect me to stick around and chat? Love to, but I'm a little traumatized right now. Maybe later." — Kelley Armstrong

Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight. — Stephen King

It all seems so worthless. Such a waste of lives. We've spent hundreds of years since the Return buffering the Dark City and trying to maintain it - scraping out a life that will soon be wiped out.
And what of the rest of the world that's already fallen? Stars blinking away, their light slowly fading? Somewhere out there a star's just dying and we'll never know about it. Somewhere another's being born whose light we'll never see.
The Earth will spin, the stars will rearrange themselves around one another and the world will crawl with the dead who one day will drop into nothing ness: no humans left for them to scent, no flesh for them to crave. Everything-all of us-will simply cease to be. — Carrie Ryan

I would rather have strong enemies than a world of passive individualists. In a world of passive individualists nothing seems worth anything simply because nobody stands for anything. That world has no convictions, no victories, no unions, no heroism, no absolutes, no heartbeat. That world has rigor mortis. — Criss Jami

Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things. — Oscar Wilde

The Infinite
It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,
I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet
to me in this sea. — Giacomo Leopardi

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. — Charlie Kaufman

When our boulevards are lined with an infinity of bad eating houses filled with dead-faced people placed like mute beasts in their stalls; today, when one out of every three marriages ends in divorce ... It seems incredible that normal human beings not only tolerate the average American restaurant food, but actually prefer it to eating at home. The only possible explanation for such deliberate mass-poisoning, a kind of suicide of the spirit as well as the body, is that meals in the intimacy of a family dining-room or kitchen are unbearable. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

I am grateful that my childhood was spent in a spot where there were many trees, trees of personality, planted and tended by hands long dead, bound up with everything of joy or sorrow that visited our lives. When I have "lived with" a tree for many years it seems to me like a beloved human companion. — L.M. Montgomery

Has anyone provided proof of God's inexistence? Not even close. Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close. Have our sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close. Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough. Has rationalism and moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough. Has secularism in the terrible 20th century been a force for good? Not even close, to being close. Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy in the sciences? Close enough. Does anything in the sciences or their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even in the ball park. Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt? Dead on. — David Berlinski

The ritual worked. That is the most ghastly thing. I hold no particular brief for the rationality of the world, but that this vile obscenity should actually have the power to bring back the dead seems to me not merely a sign that the world is not rational, but that it is in fact entirely insane, a murderous lunatic gibbering in the corner of a padded cell. — Sarah Monette

Moiraine: It seems Ryne was wrong as well as a Darkfriend. You were better than he.
Lan: He was better. But he thought I was finished, with only one arm. He never understood. You surrender after you're dead. — Robert Jordan

She holds on to a rung of the ladder while I tread water a foot or so in front of her. After a few moments, my eyes have adjusted to that I can look into hers. I flash back to Horry and Wendy, looking at each other in this exact spot a few hours ago, this haunted pool that seems to pull dead and buried love to its surface. — Jonathan Tropper

I found him. It was easy. The Church always seems to know where its priests are, even when they're traveling. He remembered me. His hair had turned almost all gray, but he still had his kindly, hesitant manner. "I told him the truth, exactly what had happened. "'The child was conceived out of wedlock,' he said, 'but the child's father was supposed to have been killed in the war. If you marry the mother now, you can adopt him. Then we will "discover" that he is not merely your adopted son, but your natural born son. So, he was your son, he is your son, he will be your son, you will have married his mother, you will have returned from the dead,' he said, counting on his fingers. 'What more can you want? Five out of six. I have no more fingers on this hand.' "'I don't want him to suffer illegitimacy,' I said. "'He won't'. "'Why?' "'I'll take care of it.' "'How?' "'I don't know, but I will.' "And he did. — Mark Helprin

I have frequently thought that the dead should be buried with all their belongings. It seems weirdly perverse that their clothes should still be here when the people you love best in the world have gone. — Alice Thomas Ellis

wounded prisoners. I wish I could hope, Miss Oliver - it would help, I suppose. But hope seems dead in me. I can't hope without some reason for it - and there is no reason." When Miss Oliver had gone to her own room and Rilla was lying on her bed in the moonlight, praying desperately for a little strength, Susan stepped in like a gaunt shadow and sat down beside her. "Rilla, dear, do not you worry. Little Jem is not dead." "Oh, how can you believe — L.M. Montgomery

One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Don't quit.
When your latest efforts fail, don't quit. When your performance is scoffed and ridiculed, don't quit. When you're told you have no talent, don't quit. When you come in dead last, don't quit. When it seems an uphill fight to keep going, don't quit. When you can't see any possible way to achieve your goals, don't quit. When your last supporter is you alone, don't quit. When discouragement and depression seem your constant companion, don't quit. When you feel like quitting, don't quit.
Time and time again you will crave relief from the harsh fight of trying to succeed. You will falsely think that quitting will bring peace and reprieve, but alas, only regret and disappointment await the quitter. Victory means never ever ever quitting.
So don't quit.
Do not quit. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish, they're not leaping for joy, they're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies, the glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here, only death and decay. — Curt Siodmak

There's that short moment that seems to last a lifetime when Mark sees the wall of water rushing down the steps of the subtrans station, like a stampede of white, frothy horses. He wonders a thousand things. How he got there. What's happened above them in the city. Is his family dead. What does the future hold. What's it like to drown. — James Dashner

We learn to flex our faith muscles through practice. Since faith without works is dead, then what if we, through practicing together, put feet on our faith and built into our lives the habit of trust? What if our faith quickened and rose to life with the habit of practice? When the anxiety pounds and we want to retreat, we practice stepping out, and forging ahead anyway. When life overwhelms and the way is dark, we refrain from lighting our own candles to practice relying on our God instead.[1] When the child seems lost and our own strength isn't enough, we trust God is faithful and He will do it.[2] When things look hopeless in the land of famine, we practice picking up the oil jar and pouring that last bit out anyway. — Arabah Joy

We Die Young is about gang violence. That was something that was happening in Seattle, something that kinda opened our eyes. It just seemed like things were getting out of hand. Incidents where kids were getting shot, and getting their tennis shoes ripped off their dead bodies. It just seems like these kids are dying at younger and younger ages and getting involved in gang activity. — Layne Staley

The stillest thing in the world is the corpse of someone you loved. A hunk of cold granite seems more alive than a dead human being. You don't expect a stone to move. A person robbed of all motion and cold to the touch is the most alien object in the world. Natural instinct drives us away from the decaying body, and quickly. Yet love compels us forward, to kiss the empty vessel of the soul departed. ...Lesson two: there are many fates worse than death. The most common is surviving the death of a loved one. For the dead, all questions have been answered or made irrelevant. For the survivor, some questions have been rendered unanswerable. — Greg Iles

When I was at the University I knew a law student named Yamada Uruu. Later he worked for the Osaka Municipal Office; he's been dead for years. This man's father was an old-time lawyer, or "advocate," who in early Meiji defended the notorious murderess Takahashi Oden. It seems he often talked to his son about Oden's beauty. Apparently he would corner him and go on and on about her, as if deeply moved. "You might call her alluring, or bewitching," he would say. "I've never known such a fascinating woman, she's a real vampire. When I saw her I thought I wouldn't mind dying at the hands of a woman like that!"

Since I have no particular reason to keep on living, sometimes I think I would be happier if a woman like Oden turned up to kill me. Rather than endure the pain of these half-dead arms and legs of mine, maybe I could get it over and at the same time see how it feels to be brutally murdered. — Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

Seems like I'm in a dream. Prince dead at 57. There are no words to describe this loss. — Sharon Osbourne

Books are portals for the imagination, whether one is reading or writing, and unless one is keeping a private journal, writing something that no one is likely to read is like trying to have a conversation when you're all alone. Readers extend and enhance the writer's created work, and they deepen the colors of it with their own imagination and life experiences. In a sense, there's a revision every time one's words are read by someone else, just as surely as there is whenever the writer edits. Nothing is finished or completely dead until both sides quit and it's no longer a part of anyone's thoughts. So it seems almost natural that a lifelong avid reader occasionally wants to construct a mindscape from scratch after wandering happily in those constructed by others. If writing is a collaborative communication between author and reader, then surely there's a time and a place other than writing reviews for readers to 'speak' in the human literary conversation. — P.J. O'Brien

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime. — Socrates

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm. — T. S. Eliot

Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode.
Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass. — Matt Haig

As long as you don't make waves, ripples, life seems easy. But that's condemning yourself to impotence and death before you are dead. — Jeanne Moreau

Though films become more daring sexually, they are probably less sexy than they ever were. There haven't been any convincing love scenes or romances in the movies in a while. (Nobody even seems to neck in theaters any more.) ... when the mechanics and sadism quotients go up, the movie love interest goes dead, and the film just lies there, giving a certain amount of offense. — Renata Adler

God makes crooked straight for us and sets things right when they seem to go dead wrong. — Mahatma Gandhi

Feel completely unable to do anything. Try to picture your life in five years. It really seems like you will be dead. — Megan Boyle

If you attack a mathematical problem directly, very often you come to a dead end, nothing you do seems to work and you feel that if only you could peer round the corner there might be an easy solution. There is nothing like having somebody else beside you, because he can usually peer round the corner. — Michael Atiyah

In the glare, the great and terrible light of this happening, God seems to signal that the story of the rest of us need not end, and that the new light can prove a troubled dawn.
For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world's worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet thought their bones like in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace. — Herman Wouk

There is no time and space limitation for public accountability on the Internet. Creative commonality is standard and does not resemble the authoritarian style of the dead communist experience. It seems that it is no longer society's obligation to understand legislation; it is a duty for governments to be understood by their people. — Eduardo Paes

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all ... only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry[the geometric measurement of solid bodies], between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead. — W.G. Sebald

We don't know those bones but I know what it feels like to know a dead girl. Her text messages are in my phone. I don't look at them but I keep them there. It seems fucked up to delete a dead girl's texts. It seems pointless. She is already gone. — Gabby Bess

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens
a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree
the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence
antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment. — Michael Pollan

If the whole world seems like it's against you, it helps to know that you've still got home. A safe place. It just takes one person - a teacher, a friend, a parent. If I didn't have you and Dad, if you hadn't made it so clear you loved me as much as you did, or if you'd said, 'yeah, why don't you do it, and put yourself out of our misery, just shut up,' I would have killed myself. I really would have. I spent most of those days wishing I were dead anyway, and what always stopped me was the fact that doing so would destroy the lives of the only people who ever cared about me. — Nenia Campbell

February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long. — Anna Quindlen

Young girls are like helpless children in the hands of amorous men, whatever is said to them is true and whatever manipulation on their bodies seems like love to them, sooner or later, they come back to their senses, but the scars are not dead inasmuch as her spoiler lives. — Michael Bassey

I've always heard that it's not nice to talk about the dead. But it seems to me that's the best time to talk about them. So I hope you'll reserve your opinion of me for a few more years.
Shelley Fraser Mickle — Shelley Mickle

But pain ... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain? — Lois McMaster Bujold

There seems a life in hair, though it be dead. — Leigh Hunt

A child is being killed. This silent passive, this dead eternity to which a temporal form of life must be given in order that we might separate ourselves from it by a murder
this companion, but of no one, whom we seek to particularise as an absence, that we might live upon his banishment, desire with the desire he has not, and speak through and against the world he does not utter
nothing (neither knowledge nor un-knowledge) can designate him, even if the simplest of sentences seems, in four or five words, to divulge him (a child is being killed.) — Maurice Blanchot

It seems safe to say that apes know about death, such as that is different from life and permanent. The same may apply to a few other animals, such as elephants, which pick up ivory or bones of a dead herd member, holding the pieces in their trunks and passing them around. Some pachyderms return for years to the spot where a relative died, only to touch and inspect the relics. Do they miss each other? Do they recall how he or she was during life? — Frans De Waal

They were thirsty; this Guillaume brought them water. It was from this well that he drew it. Many drank there their last draught. This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die itself. After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says they were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment, feeble voices were heard calling from the well. This well is isolated in the middle — Victor Hugo

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip. "Hold — Charles Dickens

Gangsta Rap is dead. I've moved on. And the raps that I'm rappin to my community shouldn't be filled with rage? They shouldn't be filled with same attrocities that they gave me? The media they don't talk about it, so in my raps I have to talk about it, and it seems foreign because there's no one else talking about it. — Tupac Shakur

I think ghostliness is a good quality. I pretend I'm dead all the time."
"What?" He stopped rummaging through his locker to look at me full in the face a last.
"It helps me go to sleep," I said.
"That shows you don't know anything about death," Jonah said.
"Do you?" I asked.
He hesitated before saying "I'm a g-g-g-ghost, aren't I?"
"I think being dead might be nice. Restful."
"Death is not restful. It's nothing."
"That's what seems restful to me," I said. "The nothing. Not being here. Not being anywhere. — Natalie Standiford

The past has given us much too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and the organization control; between the "come one, come all" of activist networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name of paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer it is put off and flogging the dead horse of how planting carrots is enough to leave this nightmare. — The Invisible Committee

Society in General Always Seems to Honor its Living Conformists & its Dead Troublemakers — Wayne Dyer

In our era, just as in every transitional age, God seems dead, but it is really our Enlightenment culture that has died. — Robert Inchausti

He sank more and more into apathy; little interested him apart from dolls and other children's toys. He still spoke occasionally, but mainly to produce stock sentences in the style of a brainwashed schoolboy. Franziska made a record of some of them: 'I translated much'. 'I lived in a good place called Naumburg'. 'I swam in the Saale'. 'I was very fine because I lived in a fine house'. 'I love Bismarck'. 'I don't like Friedrich Nietzsche'. It would be a mercy to think that he experienced at least a kind of vegetative contentment, but this seems not to have been the case. He suffered from his life-long curse of insomnia, and visitors downstairs were often disturbed by groans and howls coming from the upstairs bedroom. Towards the end of Franziska recorded him uttering 'More light!' (Goethe's dying words) and 'In short, dead!' suggesting that that is what he wanted to be. — Julian Young

In a world where no one listens, where no one seems to care, where hatred is greater than love, where hearts are hardened by vengeance and pride, where violence is preferable to peace, what else is there for him to do but heal the wounded, and bury the dead, in a war that could go on forever? — Ben Okri

Audrey's head spun. "You puked in the alley? Wow. You must really like him."
"Oh, God. Don't say that." Victoria bent her head over her knees and took slow, deep breaths.
"The vomiting seems to be her way of expressing her feelings toward Ford," Rachel told Audrey.
"Aw. And they say romance is dead." — Julie James

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. — W.G. Sebald

And yet ... marriage seems to be the worst thing to happen to me. Though there are days I would argue that that wasn't true at all, and that the worst thing to happen to me is Nick Hudson. Not that picking one definitive answer would change the outcome. Nothing can change that now. Nothing dead can be brought back to life, literally or otherwise. — Crystal Cierlak

It's weird because I always seem to be dead. I'm gonna have to change that because I wouldn't want to be typecast. — Erica Leerhsen

,dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you're lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw.
Chapter I. — Chuck Palahniuk

It seems like such a long time ago when I thought the world of him. He was some exotic planet and I was his favorite satellite. But he's no planet, just the final fading light of an already dead star.

And I'm not a satellite. I'm space junk, hurtling as far as I can away from him. — Nicola Yoon

At Columbus Circle, a juggler wearing a trench cloak and top hat, who is usually at this location afternoons and who calls himself Stretch Man, performs in front of a small, uninterested crowd; though I smell prey, and he seems worthy of my wrath, I move on in search of a less dorky target. Though if he'd been a mime, odds are he'd already be dead. — Bret Easton Ellis

When I use people I know, all of my instincts seem to go dead, and if I'm getting anywhere near myself then I can't do it. It's actually a real weakness! I hate writing personal essays, I don't think I'm especially good at it. I like just encountering [my characters], discovering them. I love the escape of just being surrounded by all these people who are nothing like people I know. But I don't find it hard to be in the middle of a different life, with a different set of habits and way of thinking and talking. That seems to come easily to me. — Jennifer Egan

S death one of those adventures from which I can't emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists ... A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer's day while I cannot? — Rebecca Goldstein

We are falling back into allegory," said the Captain, interrupting him. "If you mean by all that that the body is the most solid of realities, then say so."
"No, not exactly," Zeno explained. "This body, our kingdom, sometimes seems to me to be made of a fabric as loosely woven and as evanescent as a shadow. I should hardly be more astonished to see my mother again (who is dead) than to come upon you around a corner as I did, your face grown older and its substance recomposed more than once in twenty years' time, with its color altered by the seasons and its form somewhat changed, but your mouth still knowing my name. Think of the grain that has grown and the creatures that have lived and died in order to sustain that Henry who is and is not the one I knew twenty years ago. — Marguerite Yourcenar

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

I'm sorry. Were you just speaking to me? I apologize most profusely. I was distracted by the size of the sweat stains under your arms. Are you overly warm today? It seems unlikely given the cold, dead heart that surely beats in your chest. — T.J. Klune

It seems to me you can be awfully happy in this life if you stand aside and watch and mind your own business, and let other people do as they like about damaging themselves and one another. You go on kidding yourself that you're impartial and tolerant and all that, then all of a sudden you realize you're dead, and you've never been alive at all. — Mary Stewart

She opened her eyes.
He sniffed.
Ah! The rosemary! Holding her breath, she waited.
He sniffed again. "Is it an herb, nyet?"
She nodded, smiling shyly. "Rosemary."
"The cook at Tullock puts it in turtle soup."
Her smile faltered. She smelled like a turtle? Not a fragrant loaf of bread, but a turtle? "Surely you've smelled it in some other dishes, too? Bread, perhaps?"
He shook his head.
"In a delicious stew, then? Something savory and warm?"
He released her cloak. "In my country, we throw rosemary onto graves."
She just looked at him, appalled.
"That seems odd to you, nyet? Rosemary keeps fresh the ... How do you say-?" He tapped his forehead. "Thoughts about times no longer here."
"Memories?"
"Da! Rosemary keeps fresh the memories of the dead."
Lovely. She smelled like a turtle and the grave. — Karen Hawkins

Seen from the expressway at quarter to five in the morning, Boston seems a city of the dead brooding over some tragedy in its past - a plague, perhaps, or a curse. — Stephen King

My dear, do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for better things. Let us flatter ourselves that Mr. Collins, who seems always eager to talk of Heaven, may be dispatched there by a horde of zombies before I am dead. — Seth Grahame-Smith

The distance that the dead have gone Does not at first appear- Their coming back seems possible For many an ardent year. — Emily Dickinson

My wife loves written words ... you know, words that stick to parchment and paper like dead flies, and it seems my father felt the same - but I want to hear words! Remember that when you are looking for the right words: You must ask yourself what they SOUND like! Glowing with passion, dark with sorrow, sweet with love, that's what I want. - Cosimo — Cornelia Funke

From this height the sleeping city seems like a child's construction, a model which has refused to be constrained by imagination. The volcanic plug might be black Plasticine, the castle balanced solidly atop it a skewed rendition of crenellated building bricks. The orange street lamps are crumpled toffee-wrappers glued to lollipop sticks. — Ian Rankin

Zombies are a fairly new addition to the cannon of monsterdom. Really, the modern zombie goes back just to the 'Night of the Living Dead.' There's a ton of material out there, but it seems like there's not a lot of diversity out there. — Steve Hockensmith

Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one. — Karl Popper

It just seems to me that there's no particular reason comedy albums should be dead. There's a lot to laugh at. We have very funny people, still. — Eric Idle

Perhaps the earth can teach us
As when everything seems dead
And later proves to be alive — Pablo Neruda

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back. — Robert Lowell

Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time. — Janet Flanner

Seems like I've been here before, can't remember when I get this funny feeling, we'll be together again; No straight lines make up my life, all my roads have bends; No clearcut beginnings; so far, no dead ends. — Tom Chapin

It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything. — Fernando Pessoa

To forget the past so easily seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever increasing collection of past selves- those dear, dead gentlemen who one after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and modestly to rest. — W.N.P. Barbellion

As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy; that is why dumbness is most often the highest expression of happiness or unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches outsiders, while to the widow and children of the dead man it seems cold and trivial. — Anton Chekhov

Sometimes, something seems dead, and then out of the blue, someone just figures out the way to fix a script and it goes. — Judd Apatow

It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don't stop working -hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste - but he's not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts. — George Orwell

For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve. — Deborah Eisenberg

Scarlet watched a leaf fall to the ground, lying dead amoung the other leaves on the forest floor. "A brief life seems pointless."
Tristan thought for a moment. "Isn't that what life is, though? A brief opportunity to exist? A short gift? — Chelsea Fine