Dead City Quotes

#1. We will not die cornered and cowering in the ruins of a dead city.

Rachel L. Schade

#2. The dust that fell unnoted as a dew,
Wrapped the dead city's face like mummy-cloth

Wilfred Owen

#3. Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet's dream, silent as a city of the dead.

Erik Larson

#4. If a person is found dead here, a postmorten will always reveal whether he has spent less than three weeks in the city. That is the length of time it takes this pollution to invade the body, after which it is there forever.

Liv Ullmann

#5. Even the city seems dead this late at night.

Levi Rogers

#6. And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in the cold mud, somewhere in the city's wake.

Philip Reeve

#7. It's no accident that the church and the graveyard stand side by side. The city of the dead sleeps encircled by the city of the living.

Diane Frolov

#8. Yet for quixotic reasons
namely, that I enjoyed writing obits
I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.

Avi Steinberg

#9. I will not live in a city where dead bodies lie abandoned in the streets, and you will not tell the world I do.

Steven Galloway

#10. I don't like keeping her in the dark," Jace said.
"We'll tell her in a week. What difference does a week make?"
Jace gave him a look. "Two weeks ago you were dead."
"Well, I wasn't suggesting two weeks," said Sebastian. "That would be insane.

Cassandra Clare

#11. Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.

Victor Hugo

#12. If they're from the village, you take them to the inn. If they're from the city, you treat them with respect when they are beautiful and throw them on the highway when they are dead.

Voltaire

#13. NEW YORK- A 2-yearold girl who wandered away from a holiday weekend family barbecue in a city park was found dead in a lake after a desperate five-hour search by police and bystanders.

Anonymous

#14. The city rolled over and fell down dead. The sound of its death came after.

Ray Bradbury

#15. There is always a unique atmosphere in the car when you drive through the City with a dead body in the back.

Steen Langstrup

#16. I've been longing for,
Daisies to push through the floor,
And I wish that plant life would grow all around me,
So I won't feel dead anymore.

Owl City

#17. I thought I knew you," she snapped. "I thought you were a good man, down deep"
Cett shook his head. "The good men are all dead, Allrianne. They died inside that city.

Brandon Sanderson

#18. It struck Linda suddenly that this was the middle of the night. Even here, in the city that never slept, most people now were sleeping. Law firm time was like casino time, only instead of an endless cocktail hour it was always a neon-bright afternoon. The dead center of the workday, all night long.

Tara Conklin

#19. Seen from the expressway at quarter to five in the morning, Boston seems a city of the dead brooding over some tragedy in its past - a plague, perhaps, or a curse.

Stephen King

#20. O pity the dead that are dead, but cannot make
the journey, still they moan and beat
against the silvery adamant walls of life's exclusive city.

D.H. Lawrence

#21. No matter what creatures people fear in the dead of the night, in this city, violence is more likely to be carried out by men

Bethany Griffin

#22. I think it was probably both the coincidence and the beer that made Miralles say at some point that we were going to end up the same, defeated and alone and
punch-drunk in a dead-end city, pissing blood before going into the ring to fight to the death against our own shadows in an empty stadium.

Javier Cercas

#23. The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.

Alice Sebold

#24. Church was doing what he often did when dropped - lying on his back with all four legs in the air, pretending to be dead in order to induce guilt in his owners.

Cassandra Clare

#25. The apparition of an evil, sick unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance, and about the dead buildings in the barren air, the bodies of the soul that built the wonderland shuffled and stalked and stalked and lurched in attitudes of immemorial nightmare all around.

Allen Ginsberg

#26. In this city [Palermo] ... it's the souls of the dead who bring presents to the children ... We go to the cemetery to ask the dead for toys.

Gianni Riotta

#27. Torture is a good way to get people to talk but a poor method of finding out the truth; people confess whether there is any reality to the confession or not.

-Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

M T Anderson

#28. Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

G.K. Chesterton

#29. A minute later the steam stopped. By then, I was soaking wet and, no doubt, my pores were open. Some people pay a fortune for this kind of beauty treatment. I got mine for free, if you disregard the bruises, headache and all those dead people."
- Corin Hayes, Silent City (working title)

G.R. Matthews

#30. We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.
We let the stars shine into us.

David Almond

#31. I hope we get a decision shortly - I will be dead soon.
(on wanting to be Man City manager)

Stuart Pearce

#32. No one who writes a good book is really dead.

Walter Moers

#33. Is it just this miserable fucking city, too many faces, making us crazy? Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?"
"You'd prefer retail?

Thomas Pynchon

#34. My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.

Tayari Jones

#35. That one smooth black eye stared, and reflected in it I fancied I could see the cyclopeon city, and the endless column of the marching dead.

Stephen King

#36. If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.

John Fowles

#37. Even in the heart of America, if a small city is not connected in some demonstrable fashion to other continents, it is dead.

Robert D. Kaplan

#38. - Come Inanna, enter, Neti said to her, and as Inanna entered the first gate, the sugurra, crown of the steppe, was taken from her head.
- What is this? asked Inanna
- Quiet, Inanna, she was told. The customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned.

Hal Duncan

#39. I have always enjoyed cemeteries. Altars for the living as well as resting places for the dead, they are entryways, I think, to any town or city, the best places to become acquainted with the tastes of the inhabitants, both present and gone.

Edwidge Danticat

#40. Even in a city as small as Ferrara, you can manage, if you like, to disappear for years and years, one from another, living side by side like the dead

Giorgio Bassani

#41. Sun shines," wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, "and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends ... are in prison, possibly dead." The

Erik Larson

#42. The Empire had no political cohesion, no capital city, no common laws, common finances, or common officials. It was the relic of a dead ideal.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#43. I'm sorry. Is that too harsh an observation for you? Does that sound too much like the Truth? Fuck you. If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog's cock about Truth, this wouldn't be happening.

Warren Ellis

#44. Down the dank mouldering paths and past the Ocean's streams they went
and past the White Rock and the Sun's Western Gates and past
the Land of Dreams, and soon they reached the fields of asphodel
where the dead, the burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home

Homer

#45. In those years only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.

Anna Akhmatova

#46. So this wonderful city
Has only dead ashes for me.

John Galsworthy

#47. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design.

Kurt Vonnegut

#48. Because no windows were open and the air was so still and cold that the trees dared not move for fear of encountering more of it than they had to, Christiana thought that she had entered a city of the dead.

Mark Helprin

#49. It was Russia, January 5, 1943, and just another icy day. Out among the city and snow, there were dead Russians and Germans everywhere. Those who remained were firing into the blank pages in front of them. Three languages interwove. The Russian, the bullets, the German.

Markus Zusak

#50. I thought: "Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead." And I also thought: "This means the beyond is not happy.

Italo Calvino

#51. The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Lewis Mumford

#52. I hate zombies.
I know that sound prejudiced. I'm sure some zombies are really nice to kittens and love their parents. But it's been my experience that most are not the kind of people you want sending you friend requests.

James Ponti

#53. No, this was Philly. Drunks here boo Santa and get in more trouble than a dog with an Easter basket, and like the dog, they usually end up either sick or dead. Ah yes, another lovely eve in the big city.

Kym Grosso

#54. When I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

William S. Burroughs

#55. Why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.

Herman Melville

#56. She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#57. You know, we had the elections earlier in the week, and a dead woman, in Pennsylvania, somehow was on the ballot and she was elected to city council. A dead woman actually elected! And I'm thinking, well, I guess there is still hope for Al Gore.

David Letterman

#58. Brentford gave the polite smile of a man who talks daily with a living mechanical head about a city in the Arctic Circle governed by hermaphrodite Siamese twins born from a dead woman, and refrained from further comments about the probable and improbable.

Jean-Christophe Valtat

#59. In the city the wretched feel less sad. One can live there a hundred years without being noticed, and be dead a long time before anybody will notice it.

Leo Tolstoy

#60. They're too tired for bathing, but they're not too tired for dreams. For dreams, too, are ghosts, desires chased in sleep, gone by morning. The longing of dreams draws the dead, and the city hall to many dreams.

Libba Bray

#61. When the city burns down and people are shot dead, people think of a riot.

Allan Dare Pearce

#62. The ocean exerts an inexorable pull over sea people wherever they are-in a bright-lit, inland city or the dead center of a desert-and when they feel the tug there is no choice but somehow to reach it and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving edge, straightaway calmed.

Anuradha Roy

#63. I thought you were dead," she went on. "I saw you fall down, and - I thought you were dead.

Cassandra Clare