Oriana Fallaci Quotes

If death itself were to die, would it have a ghost, and would the ghost of death visit the dead in the guise of someone alive, if only to fright them from any temptation to return?

"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"

Everybody knew that being dead could put you in a terrible mood.

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.

The dead have a presence.

Dead … might not be quiet at all.

The dead govern the living.

There may be no single thing that can teach us more about life than death.

Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

The dead leave their shadows, an echo of the space within which once they lived. They haunt us, never fading or growing older as we do. The loss we grieve is not just their futures but our own.

The dead have need of fairy tales too.

At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

Those who in living fill the smallest space, In death have often left the greatest void.

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

There are some dead who are more alive than the living.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts?...Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts....They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind." "Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles." "The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin.

No one is truly dead until they are no longer loved.

Death is an awful thing. I don't believe in it myself.

Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground.

I felt my mother about the place. I don't think she haunts me, but I wouldn't put it past her.

Just because someone's dead doesn't mean it's over. My grandfather died more than 25 years ago, but I still think of him a lot and smell his smell.