Decease Quotes

1. "Death, mademoiselle, unfortunately creates a prejudice. A prejudice in favour of the deceased. I heard what you said just now to my friend Hastings. ‘A nice bright girl with no men friends.' You said that in mockery of the newspapers. And it is very true—when a young girl is dead, that is the kind of thing that is said. She was bright. She was happy. She was sweet-tempered. She had not a care in the world. She had no undesirable acquaintances. There is a great charity always to the dead. Do you know what I should like this minute? I should like to find someone who knew Elizabeth Barnard and who does not know she is dead! Then, perhaps, I should hear what is useful to me—the truth."
Author: Agatha Christie

2. "Could one write a strongly worded letter to the deceased requiring their full cooperation?"
Author: Alyxandra Harvey

3. "It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling. Tina and the other nurses could crack jokes and banter back and forth about contestants on American Idol before the body of a deceased patient was even cold. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but not necessarily one she thought she would ever adopt. There had to be something in between. Olive had been called a bleeding heart before, but her heart no longer had the same plasticity and tenderness—it was scarred and worn beyond repair"
Author: Andrea Lochen

4. "Why does a human body become deceased?The reason is that as long as the human body is not free from suffering, mind cannot be happy. If a man lacks enthusiasm, either his body or mind is in a deceased condition.... Now what saps the enthusiasm in man? If there is no enthusiasm, life becomes drudgery - a mere burden to be dragged. Nothing can be achieved if there is no enthusiasm. The main reason for this lack of enthusiasm on the part of a man is that an individual looses the hope of getting an opportunity to elevate himself. Hopelessness leads to lack of enthusiasm. The mind in such cases becomes deceased.... When is enthusiasm created? When one breaths an atmosphere where one is sure of getting the legitimate reward for one's labor, only then one feels enriched by enthusiasm and inspiration."
Author: B.R. Ambedkar

5. "Above all, there has never been a community that did not cohabit with its dead. But today, socially, the dead are no more. They are deceased. They are ontic has-beens. And with the vanishing of the dead, the most significant distinction between homo and all other primates is gone. When you show me a paleolithic skull, I recognize it as human not because of the cubic measure of the brain or because of the hand tools found in the grave but because of signs of burial. These reveal that this "person" lived a life on the borderline between the seen and the unseen, in the presence of the living and the dead. Neither the dead nor other invisible beings had to show themselves to be considered social realities."
Author: Barbara Duden

6. "He lived in chambers that had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again."
Author: Charles Dickens

7. "What do zombies chant at a riot?""Grrarphsnarg?" he asked, in a surprisingly well-done bit of mindless zombie imitating."No, but that was really good. Disconcertingly good.""I was deceased for a time.""True. But anyway, the rioters get all riled up, and they chant: ‘What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Brains!'" I fell into a wave of appropriately boisterous laughter; Ethan seemed less impressed."I truly hope the stipend we pay you doesn't get spent on the development of jokes like that."
Author: Chloe Neill

8. "Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

9. "...his deceased wife, watches her husband from the photograph on his console desk."
Author: David Mitchell

10. "When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying."
Author: Don DeLillo

11. "Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-uncle; though she would undoubtedly have reversed the phrase, and put forward, as her only claim to distinction, the fact that she was his great-niece. For Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had enjoyed a modest celebrity. As the marble tablet in the interior of the library informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed marked literary gifts, written a series of papers called "The Recluse of Eagle Range," enjoyed the acquaintance of Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever contracted in Italy. Such had been the sole link between North Dormer and literature, a link piously commemorated by the erection of the monument where Charity Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, sat at her desk under a freckled steel engraving of the deceased author, and wondered if he felt any deader in his grave than she did in his library."
Author: Edith Wharton

12. "Throughout Mesoamerica it was a common belief that a dog carried the soul of a newly deceased person across a body of water. According to the Aztecs, the first level of the Underworld was a place called Apanoayan (where one crosses the river) or Itzcuintlan (the Place of Dogs)."
Author: Elizabeth Eiler

13. "That all who have ever been born men from the beginning of creation, and are deceased, are either in heaven or in hell, follows from those things which have been said and shown in the preceding article, namely, that Heaven and Hell are from the human race."
Author: Emanuel Swedenborg

14. "I was afraid you had deceased,' he said. 'Or gotten engrossed in a long book."
Author: Garrison Keillor

15. "Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion."
Author: George Albert Wells

16. "Open, the eyes of the dead are a travesty, a parody, make a fool of the deceased. Open, the eyes of the dead perform that most indecent subtraction, show the person without his life."
Author: Glen Duncan

17. "In dawdling through the greenhouse, where the loss of her favorite plants, unwarily exposed, and nipped by the lingering frost, raised the laughter of Charlotte,-and in visiting her poultry-yard, where in the disappointed hopes of her dairymaid, by hens forsaking their nests, or being stolen by a fox, or in the rapid decease of a promising young brood, she found fresh sources of merriment."
Author: Jane Austen

18. "Deceased's request as stated in last will and testament: 'I want to be made up to look undead, like the fucking sexiest vampire chick you can imagine, for an open-casket viewing."
Author: Jen Violi

19. "Why do people give each other flowers? To celebrate various important occasions, they're killing living creatures? Why restrict it to plants? 'Sweetheart, let's make up. Have this deceased squirrel."
Author: Jerry Seinfeld

20. "A beloved child has many names, but it's strange for the deceased to have so many."
Author: Jo Nesbø

21. "I am Mrs. Poulteney. I have come to take up residence. Kindly inform your Master.""His Infinitude has been informed of your decease, ma'am. His angels have already sung a Jubilate in celebration of the event.""That is most proper and kind of Him." And the worthy lady, pluming and swelling, made to sweep into the imposing white hall she saw beyond the butler's head. But the man did not move aside. Instead, he rather impertinently jangled some keys he chanced to have in his hand."My man! Make way. I am she. Mrs. Poulteney of Lyme Regis.""Formerly of Lyme Regis, ma'am. And now of a much more tropical abode." With that, the brutal flunkey slammed the door in her face."
Author: John Fowles

22. "At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman's sex.In my case - and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless - that was a very different thing from wanting to die."
Author: Jon Krakauer

23. "They say that shadows of deceased ghosts Do haunt the houses and the graves about, Of such whose life's lamp went untimely out, Delighting still in their forsaken hosts."
Author: Joshua Sylvester

24. "I have no use for your body, for within its youth lies a rotten wench already deceased."
Author: Keisha Keenleyside

25. "Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word." He looked at an oil painting of his deceased wife. "For instance- I loved her more than I love our garbage collector, which makes me guilty of the most unspeakable of modern crimes: Dis-crim-i-nay-tion."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

26. "We must learn that any person who will not accept what he knows to be truth for the very love of truth alone is very definitely undermining his mental integrity... you have not been a close observer of such men if you have not seen them shrivel, become commonplace, mean without influence, without friends, and without the enthusiasm of youth and growth, like a tree covered with fungus, the foliage deceased, the life gone out of the heart with dry rot and indelibly marked for destruction --- dead, but not yet handed over to the undertaker."
Author: Luther Burbank

27. "I was murdered. Even though my heart continued to beat, I was very much deceased. All faded to black"
Author: M.C. Webb

28. "When I read the actual story-how Gatsby loves Daisy so much but can't ever be with her no matter how hard he tries-I feel like ripping the book in half and calling up Fitzgerald and telling him his book is all wrong, even though I know Fitzgerald is probably deceased. Especially when Gatsby is shot dead in his swimming pool the first time he goes for a swim all summer, Daisy doesn't even go to his funeral, Nick and Jordan part ways, and Daisy ends up sticking with racist Tom, whose need for sex basically murders an innocent woman, you can tell Fitzgerald never took the time to look up at clouds during sunset, because there's no silver lining at the end of that book, let me tell you."
Author: Matthew Quick

29. "Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss."
Author: Meghan O'Rourke

30. "*Paying one's last respects* is about the payer, not the paid. (Who attends the funeral — and who doesn't — is the deceased's last worry.)"
Author: Mokokoma Mokhonoana

31. "A dead man's vanity: his ashes full of life that cannot be deceased before a living being's pride."
Author: Munia Khan

32. "I had no tears to shed nor a prayer for the deceased... There is no hope for the hopeless."
Author: Nadège Richards

33. "Dead strangers evoked a smorgasbord of the lesser emotions and served as marvelous educational tools, warnings, and veiled threats. When an acquaintance was killed, it was closer to home; one knew some of the threads that tied the deceased to a common humanity. Without enough real connection to grieve, one was left in an uncomfortable place between curiosity and embarrassment."
Author: Nevada Barr

34. "I'd spent my entire life in Seattle, watching others pass me by, day after day, completely oblivious to me. I remained along the background. I was an outsider; the eye looking in on the world around me.I was the puppet eager to cut her strings.I had witnessed the transformation humans must undergo in order to become Programs. I had watched as their humanity was stripped from them while they lay motionless, their hearts barely beating. My uncle had told the others that he only took bodies of the deceased, but those of us who had spent time in the operating rooms knew differently."
Author: Nicole Sobon

35. "Only the deceased could hear this quietness, he thought; no wonder they were tossing and turning in their graves seven feet under the ground – they cannot take it, they want out."
Author: Nina

36. "I was able to do an invisibility spell and get in. There must have been hundreds of Prodigium there. Anyway, that's where Lara made the big announcement that your dad had been murdered by The Eye." He nodded toward Aislinn. "With the help of the Brannicks."Aislinn swore under her breath, and Mom lowered her head."Okay," I said slowly. "Look, I get that that's bad, but can't you just pop up and be like, ‘Hey, here I am! Totally not dead!""I could," said Dad, "but if it suits the Casnoffs' purposes for me to be deceased, something tells me I wouldn't stay ‘totally not dead' for long."
Author: Rachel Hawkins

37. "Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

38. "Rest and peace should not be left until you're deceased. They are two vital life incredients everybody needs and seeks."
Author: Rasheed Ogunlaru

39. "When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse and check his pupils to see if he's ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him."
Author: Richard K. Morgan

40. "A tomb is a vault, a vault is a home," Mr. Sadlot said casually sniffing the flower in his lapel. "That's where the deceased chose to reside and that is where he will be placed." Kekaju and the Hidden Swamp"
Author: Robert W Sweeting

41. "The tragedy of Dionysus: Wear a black robe at night, and white you'll wear by morning; but wear a purple robe to the midnight feast, and when you wake you'll dress in black to mourn your soul deceased."
Author: Roman Payne

42. "Walk the midway and hear the carnival barker.Come see the freak named after his deceased father.Come see the prince who wants to abdicate his throne.Come see the son whose name is carved on a gravestone."
Author: Sherman Alexie

43. "It is absurd and ridiculous, sometimes, the things that are said at funerals. The deceased have been promised celestial life and eternal life and first resurrection and immediate entrance into the Lord's arms and all this numerous times in my experience when it was a travesty and an abomination. Lacking sincerity and understanding, it did no good and some harm."
Author: Spencer W. Kimball

44. "I am always saddened by the death of a good person. It is from this sadness that a feeling of gratitude emerges. I feel honored to have known them and blessed that their passing serves as a reminder to me that my time on this beautiful earth is limited and that I should seize the opportunity I have to forgive, share, explore, and love. I can think of no greater way to honor the deceased than to live this way."
Author: Steve Maraboli

45. "Settled on the carriage seat, Olivia drew in a deep breath, the first in what felt like five years. she knew it was wrong, what she was feeling. Because of widow of only a week shouldn't wish to dance a jig. But God help her, that's precisely what part of her wanted to do. Not on the grave of her recently deceased husband, of course-that would be considered rude. Just off to the side would suffice."
Author: Tamera Alexander

46. "Constable Shoe,' said Constable Shoe, when the door of the bootmaker's factory was opened. 'Homicide.''You come 'bout Mister Sonky?' said the troll who'd opened the door. Warm damp air blew out into the street, smelling of incontinent cats and sulphur.'I meant I'm a zombie,' said Reg Shoe. 'I find that telling people right away saves embarrassing misunderstandings later on. But coincidentally, yes, we've come about the alleged deceased."
Author: Terry Pratchett

47. "The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof."
Author: Thomas Hobbes

48. "For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power."
Author: Thomas Hobbes

49. "And yet Xiao Li always spoke of her mother as if her image were mounted in a red-and-gold picture frame resting on a shrine in the corner of a tidy house, to be venerated and pleased at all times, like a deceased ancestor ever-present and scrutinizing her progeny."
Author: Victor Robert Lee

50. "My deceased grandmother on my mom's side was a real fairy godmother, who lived to be 102 and who I always feel is looking after me."
Author: Victoria Clark

Decease Quotes Pictures