For a minute, I can feel it: the sense of peace as my mind goes quiet, like I'm already dead. I am weightless and free. Nothing and no one to fear, not even myself.

Being certain one is alive isn't something to which one pays mind. If you could ask the question, you were fine. If you could not, hopefully you had a cozy coffin.

If my house were burning down, the one thing I’d take with me is my vast collection of smoke. I consider smoke the souls of dead cigarettes my lovers have exhaled.

Why the Romans, Father?" I asked him one afternoon. "Because, my child, they teach us how to bear suffering in a world of injustice where all faith is dead," he answered.

Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn't think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books.

I can't understand why dark northern soldiers and light ones are seperated into different brigades. The dead are all buried together in hasty mass graves, bones touching.

Not everyone who died had left a "memory" and not everyone who had left a memory had left a "blessed" one. Therefore, not all have died should be tagged "...of a blessed memory

O may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence; liveIn pulses stirred to generosity,In deeds of daring rectitude...

The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

I knew then I was going to die in the street without ever seeing Holly again. All because I tried to help an old woman, proving for all eternity that no good deed goes unpunished.

The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it's the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Sometimes I get depressed about my age. In March I’ll be 26. If man weren’t measured in numbers, but rather letters, I’d be turning Z. And then I’d be dead.

This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.