Quotes by American Authors - Page 3160

We love because we can lose. If there was no threat of separation, no death to shake us to our core, we probably wouldn't love much at all.
Donna Lynn Hope
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...
Ray Bradbury
It has always been this way. Death is followed by birth. To reach paradise, man must pass through inferno. - Bertrand Zobrist
Dan Brown
You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.
Katherine Paterson
Before she knew it, she was just another set of eyes in a dusty attic, waiting for the stairs to creak.
Kelly Moran
Time owed an alliance to the undying.
Thomm Quackenbush
They go on to this better place, you know, which is what they wanted all along. But you and me, we're still left behind with all the questions they couldn't answer.
Jodi Picoult
Death is the night sky, the background against which the fleeting fireworks of life are displayed, an empty stage upon which the drama of life is played.
James Rozoff
Marvin: – La necrofilia ce l’abbiamo sepolta dentro. Uno dei miei libri, Storia della tortura e della morte, parla delle atrocità che abbiamo commesso in nome della giustizia e della vendetta. Spesso erano peggiori dei crimini originali. L’uomo è un animale sanguinario.
Joe R. Lansdale
Live life while you have it; the fact that you have it is highly improbable, the fact that you will lose it is guaranteed.
Philip DeFranco
She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you could not still be dating someone you believe had an autopsy, so it was not really cheating.
Thomm Quackenbush
It’s your call. You want to go back home, go ahead. But if I were you, I wouldn’t. Home is death.
Jeff Abbott
Bad business last night. Chances are, that would be all Graham had to say about the death of a man he had known his whole life. These folk knew all about death. They killed their own livestock. They died from fevers, falls, or broken bones gone sour. Death was like an unpleasant neighbor. You didn't talk about him for fear he might hear you and decide to pay a visit.
Patrick Rothfuss
A funeral is no place for secrets.
Mitch Albom
Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever.
Thomm Quackenbush
Seems like everything lead up to this dayand it's just like every day that's ever been.Sun goin' up and then the sunit goin' down.
Jerry Garcia
How obvious can it be? ... The purpose of makeup is to defy the degradations of time, and time is just a synonym for death.
Dean Koontz
Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.
Kristina McMorris
This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.
Jacob M. Appel
I paid, got up, walkedto the door, openedit.I heard the mansay, "that guy'snuts."out on the street Iwalked northfeelingcuriouslyhonored.
Charles Bukowski
As he walked along the runway, he came upon a United Airlines pilot. “He tried to sit up,” Martz said. “I saw a huge triangular hole in his forehead and I told him to just lie still and that help was on the way, but it was too late for him.
Laurence Gonzales
Finally, I will never forget stopping near a lovely young girl still strapped to her seat, breathing slightly. Her blouse was white, her slacks were blue. At the end of the trousers were two snow-white ankle bones where her feet used to be. I had never seen the whiteness of bones that are freshly exposed like that.
Laurence Gonzales
Joan Wernick said she took two lessons from the crash. “You’re going to die when you’re supposed to die.
Laurence Gonzales
It's not reasonable to love people who are only going to die.
Kristin Cashore
The desert was a school, a school where each day, each hour, a final examination was offered, where failure meant death and the buzzards landed to correct the papers.
Louis L'Amour
...the only thing really worth doing in this life is giving love to everyone around you.
Claire Bidwell Smith
The famed philosopher Diogenes was looking intently at a large collection of human bones piled one upon another. Alexander the Great stood nearby and became curious about what Diogenes was doing. When he asked the old man what he was doing, the rely was, 'I am searching for the bones of your father, but I cannot seem to distinguish them from those of the slaves.' Alexander got the point. All are equal in death.
Ron Rhodes
He wasn't supposed to die,' he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us.Neither are you.Neither am I.
Patti Smith
Invariably, knowledge dictates life, liberty, and death, but those who have historically occupied the seats of power not only dictate what is defined as knowledge but also dictate what’s included, what’s excluded, and how it is filtered to society vis-à-vis America’s major institutions . . . particularly the educational system; ultimately, shaping the very essence of life.
Martin Guevara Urbina
A short while later, as I stare down at the bodies of the six men I have just killed, I cannot help but wonder: Do I love killing? Of a certainty, I love the way my body and weapons move as one; I revel in the knowledge of where to strike for maximum impact. And of a certainty, I am good at it.
Robin LaFevers
Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.
Mark Lawrence
waitingin a life full of little storiesfor a death to come
Charles Bukowski
Liz Emerson held so much darkness within her that closing her eyes didn't make much a difference at all.
Amy Zhang
EMBALM, v.i. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbour's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime, the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his gluteus maximus.
Ambrose Bierce
He saw at least a dozen people still in their seats. Their clothes were torn or blown or burned from their bodies, “completely naked in front, missing limbs, missing faces, some breathing, some moaning, and others just deader than a door nail.
Laurence Gonzales
For it would be only for a time. Until what he knew and thought became no longer relevant or necessary and was forgotten. But that was the same with all of us. We were only what we were for a time, at that time. Then our own silver began to mix with the tin of our future to change us. I knew this to be so and grieved for Windlow while I grieved for me. In time I would not be this Peter, even as I now was not the peter of two years ago.... Yet that Peter was not lost.
Sheri S. Tepper
I know I should look away, let him grieve in private, but I cannot. The sweet girl that I knew only briefly is the key to this gentle beast who has captured my heart.
Robin LaFevers
Pain has a threshold and so does death.
Suzy Kassem
We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it's as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can't tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together. I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different
Nancy E. Turner
s father's words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This was has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. how terribly hard he is trying to be his father's son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn't clean the blood from either of our hands.
Pierce Brown
In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And—since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form—the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirrorshards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light.
Donna Tartt
Only fools insist upon life at any cost.... Others would say that life may be laid down when it becomes too heavy. Where does it go, after all, but into the keeping of the Powers who gave it and will give it once again?
Sheri S. Tepper
Your father was no longer a young man. he was already in his fifties.'Fifty-six,' Eddie said blankly.Fifty-six,' the old woman repeated. 'His body had been weakened, the ocean had left him vulnerable, pneumonia took hold of him, and in time, he died.'Because of Mickey?' Eddie said.Because of loyalty,' she said.People don’t die because of loyalty.'They don’t?' she smiled. 'Religion? government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?'Eddie shrugged.Better,' she said, 'To be loyal to one another.
Mitch Albom
This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality--the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward--this even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin can effect a great change of heart--all at once you find you are not so disappointed in the person who is dead--but what the sight of a coffin does for a mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.
Philip Roth
I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to make nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the fist time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama's cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one's dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.
Joseph O'Neill
Life is short, death is forever.
Marsha Qualey
Mothers,fathers,our kind,tell me again that death doesn't matter.Tell me it's just a limitation of vision ,a fold of landscape,a deep flax-and-poppy-filled gully hidden on the hill, pleat in our perception a somersault of existence,natural,even beneficent even a gift,the only key to the red-lacquered door at the end of the hall,"water within water," those old stories.
Pattiann Rogers
Phoebe asked me, "Tell me, what do you think of the afterlife?"I was a bit nonplussed. I had no idea what she thought, but I knew that the question must be of greater interest to someone of her age than to me. But our conversation had been completely honest, and before I could speak, honesty and tact had joined hands in my answer. "I have no faith at all," I said, "but sometimes I have hope."I rather think," she replied, "that total annihilation is the most comfortable position."I was shaken. The horse clopped on. The children laughed behind us.When I die," she said, "I don't expect to see any of my loved ones again. I'll just become a part of all this." She waved her hand at the surrounding countryside. "That's all right with me.
Sena Jeter Naslund
I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.
Thomas Nagel
A Parting GuestWhat delightful hosts are they—Life and Love!Lingeringly I turn away,This late hour, yet glad enoughThey have not withheld from meTheir high hospitality.So, with face lit with delightAnd all gratitude, I stayYet to press their hands and say,Thanks.—So fine a time! Good night.
James Whitcomb Riley
The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.
Michael Chabon
It is brutal. Only I never could see the sense in having folks look at your tombstone and say, 'He was a man who didn't believe in violence, He's a good man... and dead.
Louis L'Amour
I want you to tell all these people that I wanted more time to spend with them. Tell them I meant to, tell them I wanted to hear what they said and tell them what was on my mind.
Kage Baker
Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even thought I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am.
Ishmael Beah
In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.
Asti Hustvedt
Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.
Marilynne Robinson
The dead boy in his arms hung with his head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape of street or wall or paling sky or the figures of the children who stood blessing themselves in the gray light. This man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads and the women stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world.
Cormac McCarthy
Just when you think you're in the cat-bird's seat, the Angel of Death calls "dibs" on shotgun.
P.L. Reiter
It's like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world.
Christopher Hitchens