Quotes by American Authors - Page 3164

People aren't often asked to make life or death decisions. There are no causes to die for. You can go through life never knowing which of your friends would really come through for you
Bella Pollen
Life is the death of all of us.' - Tristan
Rowan Speedwell
Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.
Dan Chaon
Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?
David Kenyon Webster
If you heard your lover scream in the next roomand you ran in and saw his pinkie on the floor, in a small puddle of blood.You wouldn't rush to the pinkie and say, 'Darling, are you OK? 'No, you'd wrap your arms around his shoulders and worry about the pinkie later.The same holds true if you heard the scream, ran in and saw his hand or -god forbid- his whole arm.But suppose you hear your lover scream in the next room, and you run in and his head is on the floor next to his body.Which do you rush to and comfort first?
Jeffrey McDaniel
Someday you will die, and until you know that, you're useless to me.
Chuck Palahniuk
Losing a mate to death is devastating but it's not a personal attack like divorce. When somebody you love stops loving you and walks away, it's an insult beyond comparison.
Sue Merrell
The amazing miracle of death, when one second you're walking and talking, and the next second you're an object.
Chuck Palahniuk
The best way to be appreciative for your life is to live it; don't die for any other reason but love. Dreams are what guide us, art is what defines us, math is makes it all possible, and love is what lights our way.
Mike Norton
I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.
Dee Remy
If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.
Peter Heller
When my mother passed away several years ago—well, wait a minute. Actually, she didn’t ‘pass away.’ She died. Something about that verb, ‘to pass away’ always sounds to me as if someone just drifted through the wallpaper. No, my mother did not pass away. She definitely died.
Steve Allen
If only certain things had been preventable, his life would have unfurled in front of him as intended, like a lush Oriental carpet. No surprises, no detours. Just a thick tapestry of days and nights that at the end of his time on earth, he could roll up and proudly claim as his own.
Shilpa Agarwal
Die, die we all pass away, But don't wear a frown coz it's really okay,And you might try to hide, And you might try to pray,But we all end up remains of the day.
Danny Elfman - The Corpse Bride
He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.
Laini Taylor
Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.
Stephen King
I won't be sad too often,If they bury me in the libraryWith bookworms in my coffin.
J. Patrick Lewis
She had storms all her life, but she died peacefully.
Janet Flanner
Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death.
Dean Koontz
In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.
Téa Obreht
There are a million things in this world that can end you, that can in one second obliterate the life you work so hard to keep alive. Our lives are structured around not dying. Eating, sleeping, looking both ways before you cross the street. It's all, all of it, to keep us safe from the thing that we know is going to get us anyway. It doesn't even make sense, if you think about it. It's the world's biggest joke. Our entire lives are set up around not dying, knowing all the while that it's the one thing we can't avoid.
Rebecca Serle
This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.
Richard Siken
There are two kinds of people in this world, son. Those who save lives, and those who take lives.""And what of those who protect and defend? Those who save lives by taking lives?""That's like trying to stop a storm by blowing harder. Ridiculous. You can't protect by killing.
Brandon Sanderson
Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse.
Nenia Campbell
Not that there's anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it's way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver.
Mary Roach
You smell so good,""No, I don't, I smell like death.""You're crazy, you're not dead. You do not smell like death.""I was dead a long time.""And now you're not. Hence the alive smell.
Amy Tintera
Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
Mitch Albom
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
George Santayana
The living used to wonder what happened after death. She said that whole religions were born and evolved around this one simple uncertainty.
Carrie Ryan
They looked to each other for support, for strength, and at times, motivation, to remember why and for whom they lived.
Sage Steadman
Madness doesn’t get off wearing gloves. It needs to feel skin on skin, smell the blood and shit as it brings itself off.
Benjamin R. Smith
To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.
Tana French
Psychologists have clinically observed that overly prolonged grief in the bereaved usually signifies a poor relationship with the one who died.
Robert E. Neale
He was just a small church parson when thetwar broke out, and heLooked and dressed and acted like all parsonstthat we see.He wore the cleric's broadcloth and he hookedthis vest behind.But he had a man's religion and he had a stongtman's mind.And he heard the call to duty, and he quit histchurch and went.And he bravely tramped right with 'em every-twhere the boys were sent.He put aside his broadcloth and he put thetkhaki on;Said he'd come to be a soldier and was goingtto live like one.Then he'd refereed the prize fights that the boystpulled off at night,And if no one else was handy he'd put on thetgloves and fight.He wasn't there a fortnight ere he saw the sol-tdiers' needs,And he said: "I'm done with preaching; thistis now the time for deeds."He learned the sound of shrapnel, he could telltthe size of shellFrom the shriek it make above him, and he knewtjust where it fell.In the front line trench he laboured, and he knewtthe feel of mud,And he didn't run from danger and he wasn'ttscared of blood.He wrote letters for the wounded, and he cheeredtthem with his jokes,And he never made a visit without passing round the smokes.Then one day a bullet got him, as he knelt be-tside a ladWho was "going west" right speedy, and theytboth seemed mighty glad,'Cause he held the boy's hand tighter, and he tsmiled and whispered low,"Now you needn't fear the journey; over theretwith you I'll go."And they both passed out together, arm in armtI think they went.He had kept his vow to follow everywhere thetboys were sent.
Edgar A. Guest
I could picture how Caprice was before we lost her. Dark hair, beautiful smile, intelligent hazel eyes, quick wit.Now gone.Just gone.Like a chessboard where suddenly one of the knights disappeared. A blank spot on the board of life that could never truly be replaced because no two things were alike, no two beings alike.
Cheyenne McCray
Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, ‘Give them to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.
Annie Proulx
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
George Santayana
The South-wind bringsLife, sunshine and desire,And on every mount and meadowBreathes aromatic fire;But over the dead he has no power,The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;And, looking over the hills, I mournThe darling who shall not return.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.
Paula Poundstone
Suicide is an attack on society--an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair.
Robert E. Neale
Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.
Richard Matheson
Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.
Carolyn Kizer
Be sure that head and heart were laidIn wisdom down, content to die.Be sure he faced the Starless SkyUnduped, unmurmuring, unafraid.(“The Passing of Bierce”)
George Sterling
If I could make a dream real, I would not kill anything unless it could never be changed at heart.
Robert Fanney
If you remembered somebody was as real as yourself, how could you kill anybody?
Sena Jeter Naslund
We do not play on Graves—Because there isn't Room—Besides—it isn't even—it slantsAnd People come—And put a Flower on it—And hang their faces so—We're fearing that their Hearts will drop—And crush our pretty play—And so we move as farAs Enemies—away—Just looking round to see how farIt is—Occasionally—
Emily Dickinson
The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.
Aliki
Can I just say that dying sucks? All that bullshit about seeing the light and having this inner peace, blah, blah, blah. It's crap.
Julie Kenner
Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. (“Death Ship”)
Richard Matheson
My religious beliefs teach me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time of my death. I do not concern myself with that, but to be always ready whenever it may overtake me. That is the way all men should live, and all men would be equally brave.
Stonewall Jackson
Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.
Herman Wouk
In a world where the dead have returned to life, the word" trouble' loses much of its meaning.
Dennis Hopper
In her mind's eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death's great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.
Justin Cronin
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
Annie Dillard
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Time erodes us all.
Meg Rosoff
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,when I come backwe will go out together,we will walk out together among,the ten thousand things,each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.
Galway Kinnell
but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.
Philip K Dick
Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. your life?
Christopher Hitchens