Sepulchral Quotes & Sayings

Life is an empty canvass fill it with different colors of different relationships — Anonymous

Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr. — Lance Morrow

It was as though Cutflower was so glad to be alive that he never lived. Every moment was vivid, a coloured thing, a trill or a crackle of words in the air. Who could imagine, while Cutflower was around, that there were such vulgar monsters as death, birth, love, art and pain around the corner? It was too embarrassing to contemplate. If Cutflower knew of them he kept it secret. Over their gaping and sepulchral deeps he skimmed now here, now there, in his private canoe, changing his course with a flick of his paddle when death's black whale, or the red squid of passion, lifted for a moment its body from the brine. — Mervyn Peake

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. — Joseph Conrad

So I stand here without further deprecatory words. — William James

And if it is a mystery, then we, too, had the right to preach mystery and to teach them that it is not the free choice of the heart that matters, and not love, but the mystery, which they must blindly obey, even setting aside their own conscience. And so we did. We corrected your deed and based it on miracle, mystery, and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep, and that at last such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much suffering, had been taken from their hearts. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But I could not remain where I was any longer, though the daylight was hateful to me, and the thought of the great, innocent, bold sunrise unendurable. Here there was no well to cool my face, smarting with the bitterness of my own tears. Nor would I have washed in the well of that grotto, had it flowed clear as the rivers of Paradise. I rose, and feebly left the sepulchral cave. I took my way I knew not whither, but still towards the sunrise. The birds were singing; but not for me. All the creatures spoke a language of their own, with which I had nothing to do, and to which I cared not to find the key any more. — George MacDonald

I grew up in L.A., and I don't think I've seen L.A. onscreen in a way that felt real to me. There are definitely movies, but they are few and far between. — Zoe Kazan

By the time we had passed St Clement Dane's, the pavements had grown less crowded, and as we drew by the Temple, thick woolly clouds of vapour were curling up from the steep lanes leading down to the river on our right and were beginning to suffuse the light from the gas-lamps and to deepen the gloom of the quieter streets of that quarter. Past St Paul's, on through the sepulchral City and up beyond Bishopsgate, the breeze had dropped and the haze grew thicker and heavier. By the time we had arrived at our rendezvous with Lestrade in a warren of dismal backstreets in Spitalfields, we were mired in the drab wraiths of a summer fog. — Seamus Duffy

The avarice of the miser may be termed the grand sepulchral of all his other passions, as they successively decay. — Charles Caleb Colton

He heard an eery, dry whispering whose source and distance he could not at once determine. Sometimes it seemed at his very ear, and then it ebbed away as if sinking into profound subterranean vaults. But the sound, though variable in this manner, never ceased entirely; and it seemed to shape itself into words that the listener almost understood: words that were fraught with the hopeless sorrow of a dead man who had sinned long ago, and had repented his sin through black sepulchral ages. — Clark Ashton Smith

We need to look resolutely away from the impossibilities and to the Lord. His help will come ... — Isobel Miller Kuhn

The kingdom is like a tiny mustard seed, he said, that grows into an enormous tree with branches wide and strong enough to make a home for all the birds. It is like a buried treasure, a delicious feast, or a net that catches an abundance of fish. The kingdom is right here, Jesus said. It is present and yet hidden, immanent yet transcendent. The kingdom isn't some far-off place you go when you die; the kingdom is at hand - among us and beyond us, now and not-yet. It is the wheat growing in the midst of weeds, the yeast working its magic in the dough, the pearl germinating in a sepulchral shell. It can come and go in the twinkling of an eye, Jesus said. So pay attention; don't miss it. — Rachel Held Evans

Man must seek is Maker. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I wouldn't put it past you," Kaldar said. "Or him. Who knows what the hell he might do?"
William made a cutting motion across his throat.
"He might kill you if you're not careful," she told him.
"Who, Will? We're the best of friends."
William rolled his eyes. — Ilona Andrews

He is covered by the heavens who has no sepulchral urn. — Lucan

Celestial spirit that doth roll; The heart's sepulchral stone away, Be this our resurrection day, The singing Easter of the soul - O gentle Master of the Wise, Teach us to say: "I will arise." — Richard Le Gallienne

By the mid-eighteenth century, another new attitude was emerging, one which encouraged reflection on death as a spiritual exercise and a valid form of artistic expression. The experts on Victorian death, James Stevens Curl and Chris Brooks, have described this tendency as, respectively, 'the cult of sepulchral melancholy' and 'graveyard gothic'. — Catharine Arnold

How Michelle spent her spare time was anybody's guess. Mostly she appeared to be marinating in a mood. "Got — Dorothea Benton Frank

There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell-but the imagination of man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful-but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us-they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish. — Edgar Allan Poe

I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator. — David Foster Wallace

In Alcoholics Anonymous they say you need to have faith in a higher power to help you overcome your addictions. You can't do it alone, they say. I like that approach. Perhaps if we have faith - trust and commitment, that is - in the universe we live in as God, we can work together to find the solutions we so desperately need. We aren't living things inhabiting a dead universe. The universe we live in is, just like us, an expression of life itself. Once we understand this, we will start taking better care of our world and of one another. — Brad Warner

Bayliss resumed reading. He was one of those readers who, whether their subject be a murder case or funny anecdote, adopt a measured and sepulchral delivery which gives a suggestion of tragedy and horror to whatever they read. At the church he attended, children would turn pale and snuggle up to their mothers when he read. — P.G. Wodehouse

Now here is an oddity. A question for the zombie philosophers. What does it mean that my past is a fog but my present is brilliant, bursting with sound and color? Since I became Dead I've recorded new memories with the fidelity of an old cassette deck, faint and muffled and ultimately forgettable. But I can recall every hour of the last few days in vivid detail, and the thought of losing a single one horrifies me. Where am I getting this focus? This clarity? I can trace a solid line from the moment I met Julie all the way to now, lying next to her in this sepulchral bedroom, and despite the millions of past moments I've lost or tossed away like highway trash, I know with a lockjawed certainty I'll remember this one for the rest of my life. — Isaac Marion

I'm certainly not into money and prestige. For me there is simply nothing more exciting than people involved in the creation of great products. That is what drives me. — Aaron Levie

You cannot fall in love with me." "Cannot ... what? — Pam Godwin

Go to sleep," she murmured, barely audible,
hooking her fingers in my T-shirt in a way that
didn't make me think of sleep. I kissed her closed
eyes and sighed. She made an appreciative noise
and whispered, eyes still closed, "Shh, Sam.
Whatever it is will keep till morning. And if it
doesn't, it isn't worth it anyway. Sleep. — Maggie Stiefvater

Leading questions as to my acquaintances in the sepulchral city, and so on. His little eyes glittered — Joseph Conrad

Some people always know the price, but not the value — Oscar Wilde

There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument. — Sara Sheridan

After all, is it not wondrous that we are allowed to be both witnesses and victims of the sepulchral pomp of wasting tissue? And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us. — Thomas Ligotti

All the earth is a grave, and nought escapes it; nothing is so perfect that it does not fall and disappear. The rivers, brooks, fountains and waters flow on, and never return to their joyous beginnings; they hasten on to the vast realms of Tlaloc, and the wider they spread between their marges the more rapidly do they mould their own sepulchral urns. That which was yesterday is not to-day; and let not that which is to-day trust to live to-morrow. — Daniel G. Brinton

Fear drove many on deck that were used to avoiding the night winds and the spray. Some thought the vessel could not live through the night, and it seemed less dreadful to stand out in the midst of the wild tempest and see the peril that threatened than to be shut up in the sepulchral cabins, under the dim lamps, and imagine the horrors that were abroad on the ocean. And once out - once where they could see the ship struggling in the strong grasp of the storm - once where they could hear the shriek of the winds and face the driving spray and look out upon the majestic picture the lightnings disclosed, they were prisoners to a fierce fascination they could not resist, and so remained. It was a wild night - and a very, very long one. — Mark Twain

They're not hideous," said Tessa.
Will blinked at her. "What?"
"Gideon and Gabriel," said Tessa. "They're really quite good-looking, not hideous at all."
"I spoke," said Will, in sepulchral tones, "of the pitch-black inner depths of their souls."
Tessa snorted. "And what color do you suppose the inner depths of your soul are, Will Herondale?"
"Mauve," said Will. — Cassandra Clare

A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsicously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved upon on it each time, placing emphasis on different words - "events seem"; "seem to be ordered"; "ominous logic" - pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic. — Thomas Pynchon

Cave is a good word ... The memory of a cave I used to know was always in my mind, with its lofty passages, its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its fleeting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations ... — Mark Twain

Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me. — Sherman Alexie

I beheld before me an animated Corse. Her countenance was long and haggard; Her cheeks and lips were bloodless; The paleness of death was spread over her features, and her eye-balls fixed stedfastly upon me were lustreless and hollow.
I gazed upon the Spectre with horror too great to be described. My blood was frozen in my veins. I would have called for aid, but the sound expired, ere it could pass my lips. My nerves were bound up in impotence, and I remained in the same attitude inanimate as a Statue.
The visionary Nun looked upon me for some minutes in silence: There was something petrifying in her regard. At length in a low sepulchral voice She pronounced the following words.
Raymond! Raymond! Thou art mine!
Raymond! Raymond! I am thine!
In thy veins while blood shall roll,
I am thine!
Thou art mine!
Mine thy body! Mine thy soul!
— Matthew Gregory Lewis