The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1888
Archive
Quotes
A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.
—Myrtle Reed, 1910Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with the necessities.
—John Lothrop Motley, 1858I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.
—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792He that commands the sea is at great liberty and may take as much and as little of the war as he will.
—Francis Bacon, c. 1600Ocean. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man—who has no gills.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
—Samuel Johnson, 1780Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
A friend in power is a friend lost.
—Henry Adams, 1905A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.
—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987Modern life is often a mechanical oppression, and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1935I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.
—Thomas Malory, c. 1470