I'm a live wire in a dead world.
To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.
Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
Changi for me - of course it's easy to be wise after the event, and to discuss it cleverly after the event - was about as near as you can get to being dead and still be alive.
He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.
She lived in her past life- these relics and remembrances of dead affection were all that was left her in the world.
If I was dead broke and had to feed my three children. I'd do anything.
In a lot of minds, God is big enough to raise dead people, but He's not big enough to deal with our running.
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story -- the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.
It's weird because I always seem to be dead. I'm gonna have to change that because I wouldn't want to be typecast.
I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.
American soldiers [are] going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the ñ of ñ the historical customs, religious customs.
. . . There is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end. . . Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I've decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more.
Marriage, as an institution, is as dead as the dodo bird.
I don't believe in speaking ill of the dead, even when it's the truth.
The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had.
I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, Disdain for all time to be overglad.
And you are mine, and you will be mine. They will not get you. - Eric from Dead and Gone
I won't put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises - namely, the shuffling footsteps of the living dead.