Kate Mosse Quotes

I'm 78. We've lost a lot of our great stars. I can't hang out with those who aren't here. The phone service to Heaven is so bad, you know. But I get to visit with their memories.

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.

In death, lie. In living, cry. Carry me home to remember to be remembered.

I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.

I can feel his presence here in every stone he has touched, every person he has lifted up, every street and alley and city that he has changed in the few years of his life, because he is the Republic, he is our light, and I love you, I love you, until the day we meet again I will hold you in my heart and protect you there, grieving what we never had, cherishing what we did. I wish you were here. I love you, always.

The dead are never far from us. They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.

Death, vicious death, Leave a green branch for love.

I imagine the ones we’ve lost as ghosts who prowl about the edges of the light, waiting for us to join them. Sometimes that’s terrifying, and sometimes it’s reassuring, a promise of homecoming.

"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?"

The distance that the dead have gone Does not at first appear- Their coming back seems possible For many an ardent year.

Every day I'll wear your memory like a favorite shirt upon my back

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

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?

Sometimes the dead are more alive than the living. And they can kill the living.

You are a ghost, Andi," she says. "Almost gone." I look at her. I want to say something but I can't get the words out. She squeezes my hands. "Come back to us," she says. And she's gone.

I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.

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.

When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt — we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.