Top 100 Quotes About The Black Death
#1. The Black Death was a faithful visitor to Florence. It arrived, on average, once every ten years, always in the summer.
Ross King
#2. The Black Death announces itself by the appearance of foul, egg-sized swellings that erupt on the bodies of its victims, followed by spreading boils and hideous discolorations of the skin. So excruciating is the pain that death, when it comes, is a mercy.
-The Book of the Eternal Rose
Fiona Paul
#3. There is a list of things I'm not allowed to discuss at the dinner table! I am extraordinarily passionate about the Black Death, which is not something most people are into.
Seanan McGuire
#4. Jesus, you'd think the Black Death was sweeping the globe every three months or so ... ebola, SARS, avian flu. You know how many people made money on those scares? Shit, I made my first million on useless antiradiation pills during dirty bomb scares.
Max Brooks
#5. The Egyptians had the locusts and in the Middle Ages there was the Black Death with the rats, but tourists are the plague of our century and we'll not survive this one.
Richard Conniff
#6. I guess I'm the Black Death,' he said slowly. 'I don't seem to bring people happiness any more.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#7. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#8. Give me the Black Death over a Victorian prude any day. At least the dying screw like it's their last day on earth.
R.E. Vance
#9. Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.
Aldous Huxley
#10. You're aberrated in one way," he said to Will. "I'm aberrated in another. A schizoid (isn't that what you are?) and, from the other side of the world, a paranoid. Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.
Aldous Huxley
#11. 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
#12. Putting black cloths on the hives is for us. I do it to remind us that life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life.
Sue Monk Kidd
#13. This is what I'm going to remember on the day I die," he said. "Right before I close my eyes, I'm going to remember this, the way your hand feels, the heat of your leg against mine, the smell of the skin on the back of your neck, like burnt sugar.
Sarah Black
#14. She rode at the head of a shining line of black limos like the head raven in a convocation of black birds. Her husband had moved people, and, in so moving, had become their Lancelot Satterwhite, too. Something of him lived in them, was not hers, was now theirs.
Lauren Groff
#15. On the church vaulting above was the clock-face of eternity, void of number and serving as its own hand, only one black finger was pointing and the dead wanted to tell the time by it.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
#16. She's standing above me the goddess of death, black lips and cold hands.
Kendare Blake
#17. The seals that hold back night shall weaken, and in the heart of winter shall winter's heart be born amid the wailing of lamentations and the gnashing of teeth, for winter's heart shall ride a black horse, and the name of it is Death.
-from The Karaethon Cycle: The Prophecies of the Dragon
Robert Jordan
#18. Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.
Noah Hawley
#19. I think in life there is only one absolute truth.
Death ... It's the only definitive horizon, sometime it leaps, runs across mountains and vanishes beyond oceans but the closer you get, the more you see and you know it is the final destination, the absolute truth. We are only living to die.
Crystal Evans
#20. The death of a real deer at my hands was just a vaporous, remote presence that hovered over the figure of the paper deer forty-five yards away at target six of our archery range, as I tried to hit the heart-lung section marked out in heavy black.
James Dickey
#21. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.
Jim Carroll
#22. In art and mythology, the Goddess appears in three forms. White represents the virgin, red the mother, and black, the crone, or the death-goddess.
Erin O'Riordan
#23. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing.
John Green
#24. When the grand twelve million jury of our sins and sinful fury, 'Gainst our souls black verdicts give, Christ pleads his death, and then we live. Be thou my speaker, taintless pleader, unblotted lawyer, true proceeder.
Walter Raleigh
#25. I have six brothers, and in the past I've done quite a few girlie films, like 'Wild Child' and 'Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging' - so when they've been to those, they've been incredibly embarrassed. They won't be embarrassed going to see 'Black Death' - I reckon they're going to love it.
Kimberley Nixon
#26. He [Death] pulled a pure-black iPad from thin air. Death tapped the screen a few times and all Frank could think was: Please don't let there be an app for reading souls
Rick Riordan
#27. With plastic surgery, the general anesthetic is like a black-velvety sleep, and that's what death is - without waking up to someone clapping and going, 'Joan, wake up, it's all over and you're looking pretty'.
Joan Rivers
#28. If his surroundings could have reflected the feelings inside him, the pictures would have been screaming in pain.
J.K. Rowling
#29. Seems like Death came back for me."
He grinned, a subtly odd grin that somehow made her smile back. "You drove him off again. Sleep, Tana. I will guard you from Death, for I have no fear of him. We have been adversaries for so long that we are closer than friends.
Holly Black
#30. 'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks, Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to Death.' It even has 'Go Ask Alice'-era urban legends.
Rob Sheffield
#31. Death and his scythe do not come. No sweeping black capes or ethereal escapes. There's no pearly gate, no prisms of colors as his soul slips away. The stillness is cold steel. The silence is empty with no memory to mend it.
Laura Kreitzer
#32. A 'death mirror' held up to American culture - Brando, bikes and black leather; Christ, chains and cocaine. A 'high' view of the myth of the American motorcyclist. The machine as totem from toy to terror. Thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans.
Kenneth Anger
#33. Today I seen a dove collide into the sunset, on the way to heaven and a ruined raven chewing on death, over the pavement.
Anthony Liccione
#34. Three youths in Hanover who snatched a lady's handbag in the black-out have been sentenced to death.
William L. Shirer
#35. If I hadn't learned my lesson, I would have wished we could stay there forever. But I knew better now. We'd seen what we'd come to see. The way to trick death. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch as it all rises upwards, black and blue into the even bluer sky.
Alice Hoffman
#36. Life is a risk, who knows this better than me? Who knows more surely that babies die easily, that children fall ill from the least cause, that royal blood is fatally weak, that death walks behind my family like a faithful black hound?
Philippa Gregory
#37. But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen.
-Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue
Ariel Levy
#38. I've diced with death the most cycling around London. Black cabs are far more dangerous than polar bears.
Ben Saunders
#39. ...the thought of *never again* felt like death.
Robin Black
#40. There are two worlds out there - two Americas out there. If you're a white person, there's one way of being a citizen in our country, and if you're a brown or a black body, there's another way of being a citizen, and that way is very close to death. It's very close to the loss of your life.
Claudia Rankine
#41. For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face.
David Zindell
#42. Even though we know the origin of diseases, panic sweeps. It's one thing that frightens us, because it's your health and your body - it's more like a tangible threat; it's not like a foreign enemy you can fight. That was really what was uppermost to many of us whilst making 'Black Death.'
Kimberley Nixon
#43. It was a hurting tune, resigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind to say goodbye.
Kristin Cashore
#44. Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.
Peter Heller
#45. Pain's dark lord. My enemy, my lover. Again, yet again, wanting only an end to suffering, I rushed to his black embrace. Death took me, and the pain ended.
George R R Martin
#46. Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
Charles Frahman
#47. Drawing is the most direct and personal kind of graphic expression. Unlike painting, it doesn't forgive. You put down your black line, and there it is - as inevitable as death.
Tomi Ungerer
#48. The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.
Anna Akhmatova
#49. Let all Black Poets die as trumpets,
And be buried in the dust of marching feet.
Etheridge Knight
#50. We are all bound thither; we are hastening to the same common goal. Black death calls all things under the sway of its laws.
[Lat., Tendimus huc omnes; metam properamus ad unam. Omnia sub leges mors vocat atra suas.]
Ovid
#51. It more or less has the shape of a love song, but 'Crescent Moon' reflects more my longing for an ancient romantic context that includes wild animals, fire, danger of death, stellar navigation, and seasonal intuition.
Frank Black
#52. Good! Brad thought. Great! I can see the headline now: MORGANTOWN MYSTERY DISEASE FELLS ALL CHILDREN, BUT TOLL PALES IN COMPARISON WITH BLACK DEATH. CDC OFFICIALS GREATLY RELIEVED!
Chet Williamson
#53. It is the fear of death
24/7 in every shade of hospital white and doomsday black
that sells the pharmaceutical, political, financial, film, and food product promising to make good the wish to live forever.
Lewis H. Lapham
#54. It was a haunting tune, unresigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind and say goodbye.
Kristin Cashore
#55. I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.
Catherynne M Valente
#57. Ana was the original sad girl. She held the unofficial title long before her death. We all became sad girls after that. At her funeral, everyone wore black because it was customary and because it was the color that best defined Ana.
Lang Leav
#58. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
Charles Dickens
#59. I peek over the back of the couch and there she is, my goddess of death, her hair snaking out in a great black cloud, her teeth grinding hard enough to make living gums bleed.
Kendare Blake
#60. I wore a black suit and a white shirt, a black tie and black shoes, all polished and shiny: clothes that normally would make me feel uncomfortable, as if I were in a stolen uniform, or pretending to be an adult. Today they gave me comfort of a kind. I was wearing the right clothes for a hard day.
Neil Gaiman
#61. We stand in black to watch this rite performed, the body in the box, the box in the hole, the dirt on the box.
Johnny Rich
#62. Faeries are associated with wild untamed nature, with art, and with death - so the folklore is rich with different stories to explore.
Holly Black
#63. Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape.
David Gerrold
#64. That day, that day when I can gaze at the sea
both of us calm
and I, trusting, having poured my whole heart into my Life Work ... when death
black waves!
no longer courts me and I can smile, constantly, at everything because, my bones, there will be so little of myself left to give it.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#65. The large gray spiked form rising from the bottom of the picture is to me the symbol of death and ruin. And finally the black ovoid form is the symbol of fire, lava and destruction.
William Baziotes
#66. Do you know what the Turkish say about coffee? It should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.
Holly Black
#67. I don't think about Terry every day, anymore. And sometimes I'm stunned by that fact. It isn't only the discomfort of disloyalty I feel, it's the fact of utter disappearance after death. The idea that as loved as we may be, we may also be forgotten. If only for a day here and there.
Robin Black
#68. One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.
Edward Abbey
#69. Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!
Dylan Thomas
#70. We see his smile of love even when others see nothing but the black hand of death smiting our best beloved.
Charles Spurgeon
#71. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel - although he neither saw nor heard - to feel the presence of my head within the room.
Edgar Allan Poe
#72. It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.
Elijah Cummings
#73. pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again.
Joan Didion
#74. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
-Sonnet 73
William Shakespeare
#75. Firearms are the leading source of death among black children under the age of nineteen and the second leading cause of death for all children of the same age group, after car accidents.
Gary Younge
#76. Cube's album Death Certificate: "Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black nation.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#77. The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young black men is not auto accidents or accidental drowning, but homicide.
Larry Elder
#78. People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.
John Green
#79. You see the Earth as a bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament in the black sky. It's so small and so fragile - you realize that on that small spot is everything that means everything to you; all of history and art and death and birth and love.
Rusty Schweickart
#80. Now that Karen has been resurrected, I can travel beyond the black mirror. I can discover who I have lost with the
floating hearts and severed heads of my medicine. I must now whisper my other friends back too. I'm sad they're gone ... sad and blue.
Nicholaus Patnaude
#81. In the dream, Tana's mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.
Holly Black
#82. They are paper cutouts rather than people, Pram thought. They are shadows with black dots for eyes and grim lines for mouths. They almost resemble the dead, but not quite.
Lauren DeStefano
#83. We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases
Thomas Browne
#84. February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.
Anna Quindlen
#85. The silence is death.
It comes each day with its shock
to sit on my shoulder, a white bird,
and peck at the black eyes
and the vibrating red muscle
of my mouth.
Anne Sexton
#86. Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.
Wassily Kandinsky
#87. Britannia's shame! There took her gloomy flight, On wing impetuous, a black sullen soul . Less base the fear of death than fear of life. O Britain! infamous for suicide.
Edward Young
#88. I was the first face you saw when you were born, you were bald as my hair ran black. Now yours the last face I saw before I died, your hair ran black, as I was bald.
Anthony Liccione
#89. People wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't imagine themselves not existing.
John Green
#90. Rincewind looked up at the tall black figure that had appeared a few feet away. It was, of course, Death. He turned his glowing eyesockets toward Rincewind and said, in a voice like the collapse of undersea chasms, GOOD AFTERNOON.
Terry Pratchett
#91. Black was not the universal hue of mourning in Europe. In Castile, white obtained on the death of its princes.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#92. They had turned brown or blue and rotted. Brown and blue, the real colors of death. Who made black the color of death? Black was the color of night, and the potential of a cool breeze. Just
Will McIntosh
#93. Every decent man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the woolly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his belly farther over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death!
Richard Wright
#94. Freedom to speak and write about public questions is as important to the life of our government as is the heart to the human body. In fact, this privilege is the heart of our government. If that heart be weakened, the result is debilitation; if it be stilled, the result is death.
Hugo Black
#95. This wonderful gray of acceptance resides between the extremes of black and white thinking; looking for serenity, explore the gray. Part of that acceptance is understanding that life is hard and involves life and death. Part of that acceptance is that I am responsible for my actions.
David W. Earle
#96. I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.
W.G. Sebald
#97. My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.
Ishmael Reed
#99. Alternately in our lives come black and white.
Nothing is visible through the silent dark hole:
no light, no life, no meandering respite
in the tunnel of death, journeys the eternal soul.
Taranum
