How To Be Dead Quotes

#1. The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.

Wendell Berry

#2. To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.

Milan Kundera

#3. Any advice for how to be a successful author?"
"Yes. Don't be a woman. And be dead. And do both at the same time, if you can.

Michelle Franklin

#4. Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

Margaret Atwood

#5. How can you be alive, now, if you were dead?" "Well, death isn't what it used to be.

Terry Goodkind

#6. Long-dead men leered at them from heavy gilt frames and Eliza thought how ghastly it must be to have one's portrait painted, to sit still for so long, all so that a layer of oneself could be left forever on a canvas,

Kate Morton

#7. How short a time a person had to be alive, he thought. How long to be dead.

Kate Grenville

#8. What I might do is watch Mrs Doubtfire. Or Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting and I might be nice to people, mindful today how fragile we all are, how delicate we are, even when fizzing with divine madness that seems like it will never expire.

Russell Brand

#9. Alexander of Whitby taught that the universe is like a tapestry only parts of which are visible to us at a time. After we are dead, we will see the whole and then it will be clear to us how the different parts relate to each other.

Susanna Clarke

#10. One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems ... wars, nations, destructions ... to refuse to be a part of them, and express the highest selves we know how to be.

Richard Bach

#11. Isn't it weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore?

Jonathan Safran Foer

#12. You're going to die. You're going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we're just going to be gone. The world's going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Bob Dylan

#13. Love can die. It can be killed, no matter how alive it was, it's not invulnerable. Mine's dead. It's dead and it's buried. I just want one thing more, and that's the chance to look him in the face and tell him he's nothing. If I can do that one thing, it'll be enough.

J.D. Robb

#14. Girls! Girls! Put some pep into your work. How would you act, for instance, if I told you that all for your salaries were to be raised?

I would drop dead.

Edna Wallace

#15. I had to watch the Republican stuff which makes me feel even older than I am. By the time I get through the Democrats, I may be dead. I don't know how much older I can get.

Lewis Black

#16. It's okay to have impossible goals, because if you follow your unreachable star no matter how hopeless or far, your heart will be peaceful when you're dead, even though you might be scorned and covered with scars like I am while you're still alive.

Ruth Ozeki

#17. Which got me to wondering whether it's possible to learn how to be a person in a world where all the people are dead.

John Green

#18. Our goal as parents should not be to create a bunch of good kids, but rather to have them see how dead they are and that there is only life in the work of Jesus Christ.

Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

#19. In my kind of falling, there's no landing. There's only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you're falling, it's the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.

David Levithan

#20. I'll tell you, but you'll never understand. You're on the wrong side of the dark glass. Only the dead know how terrible it is to be alive.

Anne Rice

#21. When you're used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...

Mark Zero

#22. How could this fatuous, emotional thing be without beginning and without end, the creator of all? I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its very deadest, and it had killed me, according to the saying of St. Paul: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life

Thomas Merton

#23. Whom do we speak to, and how do we encode our messages? How can we be heard or read, even after we are dead?

Ander Monson

#24. I study dead languages for a living," I said. "That's why you hired me. Why should I be up to speed on your line of work? How's your Serbo-Croatian? What's your position on the relationship between Oscan and Marrucinian?" He

Neal Stephenson

#25. I'm dead, not impotent. Nasty rumors like that must be squashed before they gain momentum. Feel free to emphasize how very functional I am.

Rachel Vincent

#26. How did your parents come to be "lost at sea", Moriarty?'
The professor paused, and said, 'Mysteriously, Moran.

Kim Newman

#27. I'll show you how great we are going to be. Because you're the most beautiful girl I've ever met, and I'm not talking about your gorgeous face, your stunning hair or your drop-dead sexy body. I never knew it was possible to be so attracted to your best friend.

Kimberly Lauren

#28. When shall I be dead and rid Of all the wrong my father did? How long, how long 'till spade and hearse Put to sleep my mother's curse?

T.H. White

#29. Trapped for days, years, centuries maybe. Dead, but not allowed to die. Alive, but as good as dead. So alone that anyone, anything no matter how loathsome would be welcome.

Suzanne Collins

#30. In treading upon the ashes of dead men in Italy, Egypt - on the banks of the Bosphorus, one almost despairs to think how idle are the dreams and toils of this life, and were it not for the intellectual pleasure of knowing and learning, one would almost be damaged by travel in these historic lands.

William T. Sherman

#31. So this was how it felt to be a walking dead man. Odd that it did not truly worry him. All was lost the moment he left her side. Nothing else had meaning. (Nicholas)

Stella Marie Alden

#32. The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there's a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#33. Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we're likely to be dead in a few hours and you're acting like it's only a minor inconvenience.
~"Spirey & the Queen

Alastair Reynolds

#34. I think most people's record collections are more interesting than radio generally gives them credit for. You're likely to be as interested in the Grateful Dead as Palestrina. It pisses me off how compartmentalised music is. I used to be in a punk band, you know?

Charles Hazlewood

#35. I take every opportunity to tell people how happy my mother is to be dead.

SARK

#36. 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

#37. The point is to keep trying new things, meeting new people, visiting new places. Once you settle into a rut, no matter how fun that rut may seem, you stagnate. You might as well be dead.

Lenore Appelhans

#38. How will the ships navigate
without stars? And then he remembered that the stars were
dead, long dead, and the light they shed was not to be trusted,
was false, if not an outright lie, and in any case was inadequate,
unequal to its task, which was to illuminate the evil that men did.

Jeet Thayil

#39. How can a governing party propose to its people a referendum that won't be binding? Is that a serious political programme? No it is not. It's the final option that will end up with upset, at a dead end, reflecting the last 4 years of the Ibarretxe Plan

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

#40. I told him they built a statue of Schultz, and then he said that a monument is cold comfort to a dead man, and then I said that the statue was built not for Schultz, but for us
to remind us how to be human.

John Green

#41. Personally, no matter how tempting it might be, I make it a policy not to surgically bestow near invincibility upon the people who would most like to see me dead.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

#42. How could it be true that [he] was dead, and how would it feel to have him dead in her heart forever?

Cornelia Funke

#43. Can you really talk to the dead?" She gave me the look that I was familiar with by now: equal parts derision, skepticism, and curiosity. "How much would it be? I mean, how much do you charge?

Amy LaPalme

#44. Every time you tell a lie an angel punches a unicorn in the face with a kitten.

Dave Turner

#45. How do ou feel about your prophesied destiny? Imust know, if I am to compose this epic."
"Feel?" Rand looked around the camp, at the Jindo moving among the tents. How many of them would be dead before he was done? "Tired. I feel tired.

Robert Jordan

#46. He did not seek to efface pain in forgetfulness, he sought to elevate it and to dignify it with hope. He would say, "Be careful how you turn to the dead. Don't think of the rotting. Hold your gaze and you will see the living light of your dearly loved departed up above in heaven.

Victor Hugo

#47. He knew that these creatures were dead, that they were reanimated echoes who wore the disguise of the people they had once been, but Tom's words rang in his mind. They used to be people. How could he strike them? How could he hurt them? Children, women, old people. Lost souls.

Jonathan Maberry

#48. It's just words. How can words be dangerous?"
"You have a lot to learn about the world, baby girl. Nothing is more dangerous than words."
"That's stupid. What about a gun? A gun can kill you dead."
"Only your body," Billy said. "It can't kill your soul. Words can kill your soul.

Catherine Ryan Hyde

#49. He who never looks up to a living God, to a heavenly presence, loses the power of perceiving that presence, and the universe slowly turns into a dead machine, clashing and grinding on, without purpose or end. If the light within us be darkness, how great is that darkness!

James Freeman Clarke

#50. Try to be thoughtful,
don't make the poor man say it;
see how human he is,
he has children of his own,
it is your job to ask:
Is she dead?
And he will nod and say yes
And now he can never not nod.
And now he can never say no.
And now he can never not say
yes.

Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

#51. I will never ever support a people swap where you can send a 13-year-old child unaccompanied to a country without supervision. Never. It will be over my dead body. How dare people.

Joe Hockey

#52. Warner was supposed to be dead. Warner was supposed to be dead because I was supposed to have shot him but no one supposed I'd need to know how to fire a gun so now I suppose he's come to find me.
He's come to fight.
For me.

Tahereh Mafi

#53. It looked nothing like America. It looked like an old painting, but real - everything achingly idyllic in the morning light - and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

John Green

#54. Dave gazed at Melanie like Professor Brian Cox eyeing up a particularly thought-provoking mountain range.

Dave Turner

#55. He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive ...

James Agee

#56. Indeed, the best answer I have ever heard to the question of what it would be like to be dead (i.e., be nonbeing) is to imagine how it felt to be before you were conceived.

Lawrence M. Krauss

#57. How can a living man be a person who has nothing to lose? This is very absurd! Even a dead man has something to lose: His coffin!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#58. A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one's soul. How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print and dead man's sentiment. Would it not be better, finer, braver to leave the rubbish where it lies and walk out into the world a free untrammelled illiterate Superman?

Cornelia Funke

#59. Zebra babies can flat-out run within an hour of being born, because if they can't, they're dead. We were like zebras, so poor we didn't know how poor we were, and tough and independent because there wasn't any other way to be.

Willie Parker

#60. Still, I could not imagine how being poor could be worse than being rich and hating yourself. I had seen enough of what it was like to be dead. It was time to try living.

James Patrick Kelly

#61. Dilbert: You joined the "Flat Earth Society?" Dogbert: I believe the earth must be flat. There is no good evidence to support the so-called "round earth theory." Dilbert: I think Christopher Columbus would disagree. Dogbert: How convenient that your best witness is dead.

Scott Adams

#62. You should be dead," he said, his voice full of wonder. "How is it that you're still alive?"
Jaw clenched, I worked at his grip on me, trying to get my fingers between him and my wrist. "I work hard at it.

Kim Harrison

#63. Life is hard, kid. you gotta be harder. you gotta take it on and fight for it and be a fucking man about how you live it. if you're too much of a pussy to do that, then maybe you should leave, 'cause you're dead already

James Frey

#64. How frustrating it is to be out-argued by someone you know is dead wrong but is more eloquent.

Lawrence Fagg

#65. Teaching was never a vocation for me. Certainly I never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be called a scholar. I wrote books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living.

J.M. Coetzee

#66. I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it's especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as 'do-gooders.' This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.

Gunter Grass

#67. It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

Alain De Botton

#68. The day I leave, you won't know how to pronounce my name. You could care less about me, and I should be dead and buried because there's not one media that will come and remember who Joe Arpaio is. That's the way it is in politics.

Joe Arpaio

#69. They're always telling folk how much better it's going to be when they're dead. We tell them it could be pretty good right here if only they'd put their minds to it.' Mort

Terry Pratchett

#70. And oh, god, how could so much regret and so much sweetness and so much sadness all be present in that single moment. I was already dead and missing my unlived life. I was already dead and Tobias was mourning.
I tried to smile. For him.

Katherine Applegate

#71. He had a son, but he died some years ago, on a foreign trip. His ex-wife's dead, too, and I've never seen any woman there." Nora shook her head. "It's an awful thing to think about. Dead for four days and no one even notices. That's how unconnected he seemed to be.

Tess Gerritsen

#72. How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.

Edward Thomas

#73. So this was how it was to be, now: I would do my best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand.

Geraldine Brooks

#74. How embarrassing would that be to be found dead, naked in your bathroom, in a pile of Honey Dust?

Deanna Chase

#75. Keep your dreams ALIVE. No matter how hard it gets, no matter how many people talk about you; they're going to throw dirt on you but that's alright, when they put you in that box (after your dead), they're going to put dirt on you some more, so that's okay - GO, don't be afraid, have NO FEAR.

Tyler Perry

#76. Being a grown up was rubbish, Dave decided.

Dave Turner

#77. How difficult it is to realize that one we have always known can really be dead, said Anne,

L.M. Montgomery

#78. Look at the world and think about a catastrophic disaster where the cell phone towers went dead. How would you ever be able to 'TEXT your next door neighbor to see if they were okay

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#79. How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, 'I am at peace with God.' She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all' eterna fontana.

C.S. Lewis

#80. How gloomy would be the mansions of the dead to him who did not know that he should never die: that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now thinks shall think on forever!

Samuel Johnson

#81. What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I'd stay in my deck chair, if I were menstruating you.

Mary Roach

#82. I wouldn't change it," Simon said. "I wouldn't give up loving you. Not for anything. You know what Raphael told me? That I didn't know how to be a good vampire, that vampires accept that they're dead. But as long as I remember what it was like to love you, I'll always feel like I'm alive.

Cassandra Clare

#83. I named my album Year of the Gentleman. Just looking at how the essence of what it is to be a gentleman is very much lacking nowadays. Someone said to me that chivalry is dead, and I hated to have to agree, but it's true.

Ne-Yo

#84. How can we preserve our planet on which little girls are supposed to sleep in their beds, and not lie dead on the road with unplaited pigtails? And so that childhood would never again be called war-time childhood.

Svetlana Alexievich

#85. Alas, how quickly the gratitude owed to the dead flows off, how quick to be proved a deceiver.

Sophocles

#86. There's something about those secrets that only the deceased person can rightly understand. Something that can't be explained, no matter how hard you try. They're what the dead person has to take with him to his grave. Like a valuable piece of luggage.

Haruki Murakami

#87. When once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country--and the time will come--then all is over with that faith also, and the idea of the Fatherland is dead; and then, perhaps, we shall be envied, as we envy the saints their inward and irresistible strength.

Ernst Junger

#88. How odd it is, that the dead weigh more than the living. You would think it would be the opposite, but it isn't. I think it is because souls give bodies lightness and air. When the soul leaves, the body has nothing left and is desperate to return to the earth. That's why it's so heavy.

Rene Denfeld

#89. A little bird moves a mountain of sand one grain at a time it picks up one grain every million years and when the mountain has been moved the bird puts it all back again and that's how long eternity is and that's a very long time to be dead

Jenny Downham

#90. Be a dreamer. If you don't know how to dream, you're dead.

Jim Valvano

#91. Although your father and mother are dead, if you propose to yourself any good work, only reflect how it will make their names illustrious, and your purpose will be fixed.

Confucius

#92. I would be lying if I said I'm not flattered being voted as the 'Time's' Most Desirable Man of 2012. Frankly, I have no idea how the desirability quotient is arrived at. If it is just drop dead good looks, then I have to thank God and my parents for it.

Arjun Rampal

#93. will you please explain how you can cry for a dead dog yet belong to a society of fanatics that urges death on human beings who happen to be Jews? Explain to me the logic of it.

Bernard Malamud

#94. Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how tobe men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity.

Frank Pittman

#95. Are you saying that the Rebel Alliance were religious terrorists and Yoda was a benefit cheat?

Dave Turner

#96. He's dead, then?" said Ridmark, the cold healing magic spreading through him. "He's a burned corpse with a soulblade stuck in his chest," said Gavin. "I suppose he could be deader, but it's hard to see how."

Jonathan Moeller

#97. We aren't haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we'd be to them.

Rebecca Makkai

#98. But think of how much worse it would be to sit here, not knowing. Until the Dead choke the Ratterlin and Hedge walks across the dry bed of the river to batter down the door.

Garth Nix

#99. Dave grimaced. 'Cheesecake for breakfast?'
'What's the problem? It's dairy and cereal. It's practically a bowl of cornflakes.

Dave Turner