Quotes by American Authors - Page 3162

Without death, life would have no boundaries and our days would not be so precious. My mother was a firm believer in the common sense of nature.
Bernadette Pajer
There was a saying in our family that no one ever died; people just dried up, were hung on a hook, and conducted their affairs from there.
Mildred Armstrong Kalish
Our society has tried to make death invisible, thinking that if we ignore it long enough it will go away. Often we as family and loved ones are so afraid of death that even mentioning the word to terminal patients is taboo. We think the dying are oblivious to what is happening to them. Sadly, a dying person frequently feels afraid to bring it up him or herself. When I enter a hospital room I often hear a sigh of relief. At last, someone is here to help the family come to terms with what is playing out before them. Death has too long been the elephant in the living room, while everyone awkwardly discusses the weather.
Megory Anderson
We all must face death and walk with it. But we also must love and live in it.
Rolando Mithcell
You Hang on to your pain like it means something; like it's worth something. Well, let me tell you, it's not worth shit, so let it go. Infinite Possibilities and all you can do is whine.""Well, what am I supposed to do?""What do you think? You can do anything, you lucky bastard; You're alive!
Nancy Oliver
Cure the symptoms, cure the disease.
Michael Critchton
His name was Theo.
Cinda Williams Chima
The Everlasting Staircase"Jeffrey McDanielWhen the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,my first thought was: can't she postpone her exitfrom this planet for a week? I've got places to do,people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boardeda red eyeball and shot across America,hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keepthe jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew uppoor in Appalachia. And while world war IIfunctioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,she believed poverty was a double feature,that the comfort of her adult years was merelyan intermission, that hunger would hobble back,hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the JacquesCousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuitstuffed with coupons. And now --pupils fixed, chindangling like the boots of a hanged man --I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chestand listen to that little soldier march toward whateverplateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.The point is I knew, holding the one-sidedconversation of her hand. Once I believed the heartwas like a bar of soap -- the more you use it,the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll snap offin your grasp. But when Grandma's last breathwaltzed from that room, my heart openedwide like a parachute, and I realized she didn't die.She simply found a silence she could call her own.
Jeffrey McDaniel
The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life.Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.
Chuck Palahniuk
The TriflerDeath's the lover that I'd be taking;Wild and fickle and fierce is he.Small's his care if my heart be breaking-Gay young Death would have none of me.Hear them clack of my haste to greet him!No one other my mouth had kissed.I had dressed me in silk to meet him-False young Death would not hold the tryst.Slow's the blood that was quick and stormy,Smooth and cold is the bridal bed;I must wait till he whistles for me-Proud young Death would not turn his head.I must wait till my breast is wilted.I must wait till my back is bowed,I must rock in the corner, jilted-Death went galloping down the road.Gone's my heart with a trifling rover.Fine he was in the game he played-Kissed, and promised, and threw me over,And rode away with a prettier maid.
Dorothy Parker
oxygen Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, while it calls the earth its home, the soul. So the merciful, noisy machine stands in our house working away in its lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel before the fire, stirring with a stick of iron, letting the logs lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room, are in your usual position, leaning on your right shoulder which aches all day. You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything? Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. Then it settles to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift: our purest, sweet necessity: the air.
Mary Oliver
The body's ills are the least of ills, for they end only in death, which is but a little thing. But if the spirit dies, then all is lost.
Michael Flynn
Death. It was something I had to think about once. Weird, right? Strange that death was ever an inevitable end, but it wasn’t anymore. Not really. I eluded it. Tricked it. It was an odd concept—the world aged, moved forward, yet I . . . didn’t.
Laura Kreitzer
For some death is an art, for others it is merely an inevitability.
Sadie S. Forsythe
Sit," Chloe said, dashing after him and tugging firmly at his sleeve. "Let's hear the rest of it. You can kill him later."~Chloe to Dageus.
Karen Marie Moning
Believe in me and you shall die, forever.
Chuck Palahniuk
And in this moment, I realize one reason it's so great to have a best friend is sometimes, like right now, Cal and I are thinking the very same thing.
Kimberly Willis Holt
a penny for my thoughts oh no i'll sell em for a dollar their worth so much more after im a goner and then maybe you'll hear the words ive been singing funny when your dead how people start listening
The Band Perry
If I weren't already dead, I'd have to kill myself just so I could roll over in my grave.
D.J. MacHale
...You see I believe in that stuff to: yoga and mystical powers. I once knew a man who could kill himself on command. Can you believe that? . . . Why do you laugh? . . . Believe it! By will of his own mind, he could make his heart stop beating for good' My neighbor poised and looked seriously at me, searching in my eyes. '...You laugh!' he repeated once more… 'You laugh, but he was a master at it! He could commit suicide at his own will!' Indeed, hearty laughter streamed through my nose. 'Could he do it perpetually?' I asked. 'Perpetually...?' My neighbor rubbed his waxy chin. 'I mean, is he still able to do it?' 'I’m not sure I understand.' 'Well? Then is he dead…?!'My neighbor's puzzled face slowly began to transform into a look of realization. 'But sir,' he said, 'Of course he’s dead! I mean to say... this man could kill himself on command, you see. And you don’t come back from the dead!' The two of us found ourselves crossing to the door so I could let my visitor out. I slapped him with friendliness on the shoulder. 'No, you don’t come back from the dead,' I agreed.
Roman Payne
It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.
Ann Brashares
No amount of wishing will bring back the dead.
Natalie Standiford
Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes.
Chuck Palahniuk
I didn't want to die. I just found death soothing to think about.
Natalie Standiford
What you don't think about when you're planning for children is when you're going to teach them how not to be killed
Darnell Lamont Walker
Life is short enough, there is nothing worth here to take your life, and those things we do gain can never be taken to our grave.
Anthony Liccione
Look around. The hantavirus is waiting for you. Ebola and the tropical rainforest is cooking up all kinds of brews to make sure that the population is kept in control. All these things are necessary. Why is there an increase in sexual deviance right now? Because it goes against procreative sex. Mother Nature does not want more children. This is not a time of birth. It is not a time to give birth, it's a time to die. The Bible says all things under heaven and that includes death as well as life. You out there, you comfortable ones, you point the finger. You say the junkie is the problem, you say the sexual deviant, serial killer, racist, and the man who hates his fellow man is the problem. But they ain't the problem. You're the problem. The sexual deviant, the murderer, the serial killer, the taker of human life is the cure, you're the problem.
Joe Coleman
Death stalked toward us on padded feet.       And it was not alone.
Melika Dannese Lux
It seems like with you everything leads back to the subject of death.""Sure and show me the person's road that does not lead to death. we try to divert our attention, to pretend 'tisn't so, but the very air we breathe is vulture's breath. Please don't be insinuatin' your man is morbid. I dwell on death in order to defeat it.
Tom Robbins
One of my biggest fears is that I'm going to die alone in my home, and my cats will eat me because I am too dead to open their food cans.
Kelli Jae Baeli
It was almost a mystical experience. I do not know how else to put it. My mind outran time as he neared, and it was as though I had an eternity to ponder the approach of this man who was my brother. His garments were filthy, his face blackened, the stump of his right arm raised, gesturing anywhere. The great beast that he rode was striped, black and red, with a wild red mane and tail. But it really was a horse, and its eyes rolled and there was foam at its mouth and its breathing was painful to hear. I saw then that he wore his blade slung across his back, for its haft protruded high above his right shoulder. Still slowing, eyes fixed upon me, he departed the road, bearing slightly toward my left, jerked the reins once and released them, keeping control of the horse with his knees. His left hand went up in a salute-like movement that passed above his head and seized the hilt of his weapon. It came free without a sound, describing a beautiful arc above him and coming to rest in a lethal position out from his left shoulder and slanting back, like a single wing of dull steel with a minuscule line of edge that gleamed like a filament of mirror. The picture he presented was burned into my mind with a kind of magnificence, a certain splendor that was strangely moving. The blade was a long, scythe like affair that I had seen him use before. Only then we had stood as allies against a mutual foe I had begun to believe unbeatable. Benedict had proved otherwise that night. Now that I saw it raised against me I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own mortality, which I had never experienced before in this fashion. It was as though a layer had been stripped from the world and I had a sudden, full understanding of death itself.
Roger Zelazny
Every living thing requires love to survive for without it, we die.
Sanjo Jendayi
Please bury me in the library With a dozen long-stemmed proses
J. Patrick Lewis
The first time I died, I didn't see God. No light at the end of the tunnel. No haloed angels. No dead grandparents. To be fair, I probably wasn't a solid shoo-in for Heaven. But, honestly, I kind of assumed I'd make the cut.
Megan Miranda
Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won't. Or will-depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living.
Truman Capote
I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.
Orson Scott Card
We've learned from this that death can hurt us. It can surprise us. It can scare us. It can keep us up a night. But we've also learned the things that death cannot do. It cannot crush our hopes. It cannot take away the love and support of our family and friends. It cannot make us lose our unending faith in world and in God. It has saddened us, but it will not prevail.
John Corey Whaley
For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.
John Scalzi
I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so blue. "There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed for that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you.
John Green
I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima
Ernest Hemingway
There are worse ways to die than warm and drunk.
George R.R. Martin
I'm trying to decide what's worse. Someone being gone, but still out there, or someone being gone forever, dead. I think someone being gone, but still out there, might be worse. Then there’s always the chance, the hoping, the wondering if things might change. If maybe one day he’ll come back. There’s also the wondering about what his new life is like. The life without you. Is he happier? And if he is, you’re left being sad, wondering what it would be like if you were happy with him. But when someone is dead, he’s dead. He’s not coming back. There is no second chance. Death is a period at the end of a sentence. Someone gone, but still out there, is an ellipsis…or a question to be answered.
Samantha Schutz
You can't escape an assasin," He leaned forward, shadows swallowing his eyes. "Hangings, bumbling bureaucrats, dishonest crewman, jail - those you can talk your way out of, you try hard enough. But this kind of death is the is the only kind of death.
Cassandra Rose Clarke
I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen.
David Foster Wallace
You can’t get the blood out.
Steven Ramirez
Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
John Updike
The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other - child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway towards the goal-box of solitary death.
Daniel Keyes
A tired man lay down his headin a dusty room so dim,and for so long his wife did shakeand yell to waken him.Meanwhile his thoughts, his dreams, did stirof sandy, red bullfights,of powder-blasts in the airand carnival delights.Yet still his wife was in despairin a dusty room so dim,for she knew death was a whorenot far from tempting him.
Roman Payne
I'm one of those who doesn't think there is much differencebetween an atomic scientist and a man who cleans the crappersexcept for the luck of the draw - parents with enough money to point you toward a moregenerous death.of course, some come through brilliantly, butthere are thousands, millions of others, bottled up, keptfrom even the most minute chance to realize their potential.
Charles Bukowski
Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man’s upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart.
Laird Barron
The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...
Ramez Naam
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,And our hearts, though stout and brave,Still, like muffled drums, are beatingFuneral marches to the grave.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I'll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be.
Alice Walker
I believe that to be the world's greatest livingwriterthere must be somethingterribly wrong with you.I don't even want to be the world's greatestdead writer.just being dead would be fairenough.
Charles Bukowski
What are you doing to me?” he asked the crow, tearful. Teaching you how to fly. “I can’t fly!” You’re flying right now. “I’m falling!” Every flight begins with a fall, the crow said.
George R.R. Martin
We are all dust passing through the air, the difference is, some are flying high in the sky, while others are flying low. But eventually, we all settle on the same ground.
Anthony Liccione
It was Mina this whole time, wasn’t it?" I give him the only thing I can: the cold, hard truth. The one that’ll rewrite every memory he has - of him and me, her and me, the two of them, all three of us: "It’ll always be Mina.
Tess Sharpe
When your people are lying dead around you, don't come crying to me...
Sarah J Maas
I wonder if my first breath was as soul-stirring to my mother as her last breath was to me. – From 14 Days: A Mother, A Daughter, A Two-Week Goodbye
Lisa Goich
Awareness of mortality exerts a unique power to focus the mind and heart on essentials.
Columba Stewart