Deadly Quotes (page 92)
Because I liked you better. Than suits a man to say, It irked you, and I promised. I'd throw the thought away. To put the world between us. We parted stiff and dry:'Farewell,' said you, 'forget me.''Fare well, I will,' said I. If e'er, where clover whitens. The dead man's knoll, you pass, And no tall flower to meet you. Starts in the trefoiled grass, Halt by the headstone shading. The heart you have not stirred, And say the lad that loved you. Was one that kept his word.
A. E. Housman
That small world, like the great one out of doors, had the capacity of easily forgetting its dead; and when the cook had said she was a quiet-tempered lady, and the housekeeper had said it was the common lot, and the butler had said who'd have thought it, and the housemaid had said she couldn't hardly believe it, and the footman had said it seemed exactly like a dream, they had quite worn the subject out, and began to think their mourning was wearing rusty too.
Charles Dickens
Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. - Dr. Carl...
Carl Sagan
And all at once the heavy night. Fell from my eyes and I could see, --A drenched and dripping apple-tree, A last long line of silver rain, A sky grown clear and blue again. And as I looked a quickening gust. Of wind blew up to me and thrust. Into my face a miracle. Of orchard-breath, and with the smell, --I know not how such things can be! --I breathed my soul back into me. Ah! Up then from the ground sprang IAnd hailed the earth with such a cry. As is not heard save from a man. Who has been...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings--his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again...When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.
Elie Wiesel
What a hell of a welcome. I’m sorry. But there’s so much still to do outside before the weather closes, and we have to tackle all the dreary minuti on weapons and theory where all your knightly warriors start losing their tempers and you have to go through a deadly routine of light relief with competitions and war jokes and community singing, and long, long stories of rape and battle and Generals I have Known.
Dorothy Dunnett
The good and the evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality, Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried.
Jose Saramago
I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.
Elie Wiesel
To be sure there are standards by which the early Protestants could be called "puritanical"; they held adultery, forunication, and perversion for deadly sins. But then so did the Pope. If that is puritanism, all Christendom was then puritanical together. So far as there was any difference about sexual morality, the Old Religion was the more austere. the exaltation of virginity is a Roman, that of marriage, a Protestant, trait." (35)
C. S. Lewis
Have you ever happened, reader, to feel that subtle sorrow of parting with an unloved abode? The heart does not break, as it does in parting with dear objects. The humid gaze does not wander around holding back a tear, as if it wished to carry away in it a trembling reflection of the abandoned spot; but in the best corner of our hearts we feel pity for the things which we did not bring to life with our breath, which we hardly noticed and are now leaving forever. This already dead iventory...
Vladimir Nabokov