Quotes by American Authors - Page 3170

There is shadow under this red rock // (Come in under the shadow of this red rock) // And I will show you something different from either // Your shadow at morning striding behind you // Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you // I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T.S Eliot
I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.
Mark Slouka
Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.
Lauren Oliver
Music links us humans, heart to heart...Across time and space, and life and death.
Nancy Werlin
Smiling at death seems like a pretty bold act. And so I smile like a damned fool.
Emm Cole
Ignorance is not bliss. It is the kiss of death.
Suzy Kassem
Though there had been moments of beauty in it Mariam knew that life for most part had been unkind to her.But as she walked the final twenty paces,she could not help but wish for more of it.She wished she could see Laila again , wished to hear the clangor of her laugh , to sit with her once more for a pot of chai and leftover halwa under a starlit sky. She mourned that she would never see Aziza grow up , would not see the beautiful young woman that she would oneday become ,would not get to paint her hands with henna and toss noqul candy at her wedding . She would never play with Aziza's children. She would have liked that very much , to be old and play with Aziza's children.Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes , it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that wshed over her. She thought of her entry into this world , the harami child of a lowly villager , an unintended thing , a pitiable , regrettable accident. A weed , And yet she was leaving the wolrd as a woman who had loved and been loved back.She was leaving it as a friend , a companion , a guardian.A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was no so bad , Mariam thought , that she should die this way. Not so bad.This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings. pg. 360
Khaled Hosseini
You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
Ursula K Le Guin
This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift - or curse, perhaps - of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Yes, Max, you are going to die. Just like everybody else.Thank you, Confucious.
James Patterson
Sometimes the dying live more fiercely and wisely than the rest of us. (146)
Julia Cameron
No mother should lose her child.
Ann Hood
Death is the reward for living
Sylvia Browne
I'll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who'll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.
Orson Scott Card
Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?
Richard Bach
Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it.
Laurence Gonzales
We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.
Stephen King
Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.
Lafcadio Hearn
Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.
Jim Harrison
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps, And here you are the mothers' laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. ...What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Walt Whitman
It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.
Toni Morrison
To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?" he said.I placed my hands flat on the table and leaned across it. "Stay the hell away from him.""Who? Oh, you mean the guy who's gonna bite it soon?" "He's not. He's going to be fine."He reached a hand out and placed it over my own. I snatched my hand back. He shook his head at me and whispered, "You can't stop it.""Watch me.
Megan Miranda
Why won't they let me be? I just need to rest, that's all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little.
George R.R. Martin
But hey, if there’s one bright side to your dying, it’s that you aren’t around to tell me things I don’t like hearing. I’m sorry. That was a dickhead thing to say. I need a condom for my mouth.
Adam Silvera
Shakespeare’s enduring tragedy did its part to further the goals of the Mercenaries—glamorizing death, making dying for love seem the most noble act of all, though nothing could be further from the truth. Taking an innocent life—in a misguided attempt to prove love or for any other reason—is a useless waste.
Stacey Jay
Copulation is no more foul to me than death is.
Walt Whitman
Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable. Tell me, then, Alobar, in order to achieve immortality, should you emulate water or stone? Should you trust your flesh or your bones?
Tom Robbins
But that's the thing with death. The whisper of it descent travels fast and wide, and people must've know I'd become a corpse because nobody even came to view the body.
Gayle Forman
Destiny, if I could sit across the porch from God, I'd thank Him for Lending me you.....
Flavia Weedn
Once a flower is picked it immediately begins to die.
Nenia Campbell
But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.
Richard Feynman
It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart's intervention, I'd have been dead again already.That's right--you heard me: dead again already.I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that?
Jim Butcher
Not easy to state the change you made.If I'm alive now, I was dead,Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
Sylvia Plath
No popularity exists when tragedy strikes. All that's left are human hearts and love and ache. We all love each other, deep down, and when we see another soul in pain we can't help but hurt too.
Maya Van Wagenen
I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.
William Goldman
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Sylvia Plath
Only.. I want to do die as myself
Suzanne Collins
Give me liberty or give me death.".]
Patrick Henry
What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead.
John Green
For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, - still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, - pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die.
John Green
Death comes to me again, a girlin a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.It’s not so terrible she tells me,not like you think, all darknessand silence. There are windchimesand the smell of lemons, some daysit rains, but more often the air is dryand sweet. I sit beneath the staircasebuilt from hair and bone and listento the voices of the living. I like it,she says, shaking the dust from her hair,especially when they fight, and when they sing.
Dorianne Laux
I can't do anything to death, doctor's orders.
Woody Allen
The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.
Spider Robinson
It's normal to shy away from illness and death. It's natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.
Ellyn Bache
The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for---if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.
Robert A. Heinlein
Never underestimate the will of a creature who begins to die at birth.
Lyn Benedict
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
But really, anybody could die any day, whether you were ready or not. It could be your pet fish or your sister or you. Nothing is the same forever. Maybe all the people on Earth are God's little pet fish. God lives such a long time that people's lives probably seem really short to him. He watches them swim for a little while, and then they stop swimming.
Suzanne LaFleur
You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity. (24)
Stephen Levine
In the end, we all lose it. Remember that. In the end, we own nothing.
Richard Paul Evans
He was Death, and he'd ridden in on a pale horse...
Sherrilyn Kenyon
A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.
Dean Koontz
Colder by the hour, more dead with every breath.
John Green
I want you here. I don't care if it's a hundred degrees and every blade of grass dies. Without you, none of that matters to me.
Kami Garcia
A man falling off a cliff to certain death will stretch out a hand even to his worst enemy.
Robert Jordan
If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease. . . Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.
Richard Matheson
I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die.
Meriwether Lewis
There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
Barbara Kingsolver
And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
Cormac McCarthy