Quotes by American Authors - Page 3159

Why should I be sad? Everyone has to die. If you have a body, it's too late to cry. It's only funerals I can't stand.
Rachel Klein
Nothing was working, and my friend was dead, and I didn't want to look at that.
Anthony Kiedis
A sea of red lights, and I slow down. My job now is to gather everyone together and tell them we have to let her go. I won't tell anyone over the phone, because I didn't like hearing the news from the doctor that way. I have maybe a week to handle the arrangements, as the doctor said, but the arrangements are overwhelming. How do I learn how to run a family? How do I say goodbye to someone I love so much that I've forgotten just how much I love her?
Kaui Hart Hemmings
I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Suffering invites us to place our hurts in larger hands. In Christ we see God suffering – for us. And calling us to share in God’s suffering love for a hurting world. The small and even overpowering pains of our lives are intimately connected with the greater pains of Christ. Our daily sorrows are anchored in a greater sorrow and therefore a larger hope.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
you can pass a football,you can gas,but you yourself cannot just pass~cam after lilly's mother informs her that lilly has passed
Wendy Wunder
I have read of the great wars of ages past, and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to their deaths, for it is our nature to banish such thoughts.
Seth Grahame-Smith
She had been born with a different name, to a woman with laughing eyes and warmly whispered words of love who’d died degraded and afraid on a misty Irish morning.
C.S. Harris
I don't want to die, but I don't want to be the only one to live, either. When I was sitting alone last night, I kind of figured maybe that's how Jesus felt.
Dean Briggs
What did she care what became of this world when her loved ones were dead and gone?
Allie Burke
Let us pray now for the future dead. Though we do not yet know their names, we know that there shall be far too many of them.
Seth Grahame-Smith
Not that there seems to be any appropriate place to bury someone, but these municipal cemeteries, or any cemetery at all for that matter, like the ones by the highway, or the ones in the middle of town, with all these bodies with their corresponding rocks - oh it's just too primitive and vulgar, isn't it? The hole, and the box, and the rock on the grass? And we glamorize this process, feel it fitting and dramatic, austerely beautiful, standing there by the hole as we lower the box. It's incredible. Barbaric and base.
Dave Eggers
That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.
Susan Sontag
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Boys play with death as though it were a game, cutting their teeth on daggers.
Sheri S. Tepper
You're the right colour for the Angel of Death, Mister Cale. But a little short.' 'I could cut your head off and stand on it. Then I'd be taller.
Paul Hoffman
How easy is murder when one calls it by a different name? How much easier is it for the conscience to condone “reaping” than “killing”—and when one knows that death isn’t the end, does it stop the killing hand for fear of retribution, or does it simply make it easier to kill, because, if life continues, how can murder be murder at all?
Neal Shusterman
I think about the Old Ones, that they have a past but no history. I think about the inevitability of death, and whether it’s not that very inevitability that inspires us to take photographs and make scrapbooks and tell stories. That that’s how we humans find our way to immortality. This is not a new thought; I’ve had such thoughts before. But I have a new thought now. That that’s how we find our way toward meaning. Meaning. If you’re going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots.
Franny Billingsley
If I lived by some code, my actions would become predictable. The enemy would take advantage of this and I’d be killed. An honorable death doesn’t exist. Death is death. But it’s funny that survival and revenge require the same thing: no honor codes, no supposed higher principles to aspire to, no mercy
Frank Beddor
A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world
Ron Rash
I want to stay," and then, more weakly, "Need some more sun."A fly from a batch of seaweed lands on a white, bony thigh. She doesn't slap at it. It doesn't go away."But there's no sun, dude." I tell her.I start to walk away. So what, I mutter under my breath. When she wants to come in, she will. Imagine a blind person dreaming. I head back up toward the house. Wonder if Griffin will stick around, if Mona made reservations for dinner, if Spin will call back. "I know what the word dead means," I whisper to myself as softly as I can because it sounds like an omen.
Bret Easton Ellis
I had been allowed to believe in man's innate goodness for the twenty-two years of my life, and I had hoped to carry the belief with me to my grave.
Charlotte Rogan
For that half-hour in the hospital delivery room I was intimate with immensity, for that half-minute before birth I held her hands and for that duration we three were undivided, I felt the blood of her pulse as we gripped hands, felt her blood beat in the rhythm that reached into the baby as she slipped into the doctor's hands, and for a few days we touched that immensity, we saw through her eyes to an immense intimacy, saw through to where she had come from, I felt important being next to her, and the feeling lasted when we entered our car for the drive home, thinking to myself that we weren't to be trusted with our baby, the feeling lasting while I measured us against the landscape, the February rain, the pewter sky, and then the rain freezing to the roadway, the warmth of the interior of the car with its unbreakable transparent sky dome and doors, until the car spun on the ice in the lane and twirled so that I could take an hour to describe how I threw up my hands in anguish as the baby slipped from her arms and whipped into the face of her mother reflected in the glass door, and she caught the baby back into her arms as the car glided to a stop in its usual place at the end of the drive, and nothing but silence and a few drops of blood at a nostril suggested that we would now be intimate with the immensities of death ("Interim")
William S. Wilson
Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?
Lionel Shriver
The only way to find out if you're immortal is to make it to the end of time and look around to see if you're still alive. Until you've done that, all you know is that you haven't died yet.
John Patrick Lowrie
I was just walking around saying “We’re all gonna die!” I never got over it. I went to class, I did what I had to do, but I was a gibbering idiot. It never went away. I never again felt the same way about life and death.
Anne Rice
All that tread,The globe are but a handful to the tribes,That slumber in its bosom.
William Cullen Bryant
Do the thing you love to do. Hank Williams died at the ripe old age of twentynine. Stevie Ray Vaughan at thirty-five. Jesus at thirtythree. Don’t think you’re special and the Lord’s gonna bless you with time.
Jill S. Alexander
Adam pressed his hand to his face. Sighed. "Right. It's just that… He died. And I'm so freaking pissed off, I swear I'd punch him in the face if he were standing right here.
Kristina McBride
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies heonly appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people tocry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always willexist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we canlook at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent allthe moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just anillusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on astring, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a badcondition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of othermoments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say whatthe Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Mr. Asher, you can resist who you are for only so long. Finally, you just decide to go with fate.
Christopher Moore
Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.
Téa Obreht
I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.
Ernest Hemingway
Death isn't funny." "Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.
Robert A. Heinlein
Suffering is part of life,' she said. 'All the parts of life are jumbled up together; you can't separate out just the one thing.' She parred his hand again, kindly. 'I could let you kill me now, lovely man, and have peace and good dreams forever. But who knows what I get instead, if I stay? Maybe time to see a new grandchild. Maybe a good joke that sets me laughing for days. Maybe another handsome young fellow flirting with me.' She grinned toothlessly, then let loose another horrible, racking cough. Ehiru steadies her with shaking hands. 'I want every moment of my life, pretty man, the painful and the sweet alike. Until the very end. If these are all the memories I get for eternity, I want to take as many of them with me as I can.
N K Jemisin
The Nevernever is dying, human. It grows smaller and smaller every decade. Too much progress, too much technology. Mortals are losing their faith in anything but science. Even the children of man are consumed by progress. They sneer at the old stories and are drawn to the newest gadgets, computers, or video games. They no longer believe in monsters of magic. As cities grown and technology takes over the world, belief and imagination fade away, and so do we.""What can we do to stop it?" I whispered."Nothing." Grimalkin raised a hind leg and scratched an ear. "Maybe the Nevenever will hold out till the end of the world. Maybe it will disappear in a few centuries. Everything dies eventually, human.
Julie Kagawa
I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.
Marilynne Robinson
It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all.Death is a head-on collision with your plans.But everything in life--the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat--everything there is was born from a collision.Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another.And something new is created when the person you love dies.Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are.This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.
Augusten Burroughs
Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.
Elizabeth McCracken
A los mortales os hace falta compañía porque tenéis tristeza, deseos y un tiempo limitado de vida.
Jackson Pearce
Wenn jemand starb, dem du dein Herz geschenkt hattest, nahm er es dann mit?
Jodi Picoult
What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be for him to say, to tell the people? What message could he bring?What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull?
Philip K Dick
...it does not matter if we are forgotten; what matters is the effect we have on those around us and those who come after us. What matters is how our own lives affect the larger, perpetual community of the living.
Lynn Schooler
They are trying to take you back from me now, and they will—but only for a brief, little while—
Maryrose Wood
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
Paul Theroux
Maybe Laney's right. Maybe June did love me. But I'm far less certain that she knew I loved her. Did she realise how much I needed her around? It's not like I ever told her. I was too wrapped up in my own world to notice what was going on in hers. Even if she did know, it wasn't enough to count. It wasn't enough to make her stay. So really, what did it matter, in the end? wasn't enough. There's no excuse. There is nothing that will ever make that okay.
Hannah Harrington
You can't make me do nothing but die!
Richard Wright
more. To have days cut off and at their end. To never again..........anything.
Richelle E. Goodrich
It's what's known as an origin myth. What happened to me? That's no myth.
Meg Cabot
It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing ever happened, makes me want to scream. I know it's irrational to expect everything to grind to a halt because of June, but still. A wave of anxiety builds in my chest, my head pounding so loud it drowns out the noise of people talking and tapping away on their laptops.
Hannah Harrington
[Jesus] tilted His head back, pulled up one last time to draw breath and cried, "Tetelestai!" It was a Greek expression most everyone present would have understood. It was an accounting term. Archaeologists have found papyrus tax receipts with "Tetelestai" written across them, meaning "paid in full." With Jesus' last breath on the cross, He declared the debt of sin cancelled, completely satisfied. Nothing else required. Not good deeds. Not generous donations. Not penance or confession or baptism or...or...or...nothing. The penalty for sin is death, and we were all born hopelessly in debt. He paid our debt in full by giving His life so that we might live forever.
Charles R. Swindoll
Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.
Christopher Hitchens
Maybe one did have to be smart in order to kill.
Markelle Grabo
Losing you're co-remember meant losing the memory itself.
John Green
Like they just wanted to enjoy The Gus Waters Show while it was still in town.
John Green
Where death follows, there’s life. When darkness surrounds you in a world of chaos, search and you’ll eventually find the light.
Lee Argus
And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortably strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world...
Ray Bradbury
Death, he had come to believe, was a corrosive thing, and the more he was around it , the more it gnawed away at who he was.
Christopher Paolini
Man. Being mostly dead is hard on a guy.
Jim Butcher
I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.
Maya Angelou