Deadly Quotes (page 9)
R-4 got stuck on the First Law. "Can anyone really protect a human being from all harm whatever?" it thought. "No. It is inevitable that all humans must be injured, contract illnesses and ultimately die. The future can only be averted for humans who are already dead. Ergo..." It took a dozen cops to subdue R-4, after his blood orgy in a department store (83 dead, none injured).
John Sladek
Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference,...
Thomas Carlyle
Kim Jong Il, incidentally, has been made head of the party and of the army, but the office of the presidency is still 'eternally' held by his adored and departed dad, who died on July 8, 1994, at 82. (The Kim is dead. Long live the Kim.) This makes North Korea the only state in the world with a dead president. What would be the right term for this? A necrocracy? A thanatocracy? A mortocracy? A mausolocracy? Anyway, grimly appropriate for a morbid system so many of whose children have died...
Christopher Hitchens
I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.
Jeanette Winterson
The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:—against whom, against whom?
Erich Maria Remarque
Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail.
Lao Tzu
But you're dead," said Harry.
"Oh yes," said Dumbledore matter-of-factly.
"Then...I'm dead too?"
"Ah," said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. "That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.”
They looked at each other, the old man still beaming.
"Not?" repeated Harry.
"Not," said Dumbledore.
"But…" Harry raised his hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. "But I should have died—I didn't defend myself! I meant to let him kill...
J. K. Rowling
TINA: Oh, Rick, Rick, I’m scared. What’s happened to us? I can’t seem to find us any more. I reach out and reach out and we’re just not there. I’m frightened. I’m a frightened child (Looks out the window) I hate this rain. Sometimes I see me dead in it.
RICK (quietly): My darling, isn’t that a line from ‘A Farewell To Arms’?
TINA (turns, furious): Get out of here. Get out! Get out of here before I jump out of this window.
Zooey took a parting look at the page he had been reading, then closed...
J. D. Salinger
The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live. My brothers are dead and my sister is dead and I wonder if they died for Ireland or the Faith. Dad says they were too young to die for anything. Mam says it was disease and starvation and him never having a job. Dad says, Och, Angela, puts on his cap and goes for a long walk
Frank McCourt
The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian, and Polish, and Latin about dead husbands and dead children. Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of...
Pete Hamill
Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask--perhaps more than once--where the dead person is and when he is coming back.
Richard Adams