Graves Quotes

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.

The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for
nothing.

...

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“I got a washed out version of Mom’s curls and a better copy of Dad’s blue eyes, The rest of me, I guess, is up for grabs. Except maybe Gran’s nose, but she could have been trying to make me feel better. I’m no prize. Most girls go through a gawky stage, but I’m beginning to think mine will be a lifelong thing. It doesn’t bother me too much. Better to be strong than pretty and useless. I’ll take a plain girl with her head screwed on right over a cheerleader any day.”
― Lilith Saintcrow, Strange Angels

“Who. Hit. You?”
― Lilith Saintcrow, Jealousy

“The only one," he murmured. His chin dipped a little bit. "You know that, Dru? You're the only person who's ever believed in me. You know what that'll do to a guy?"

What?"I-"

"It makes him want to live up to it.”
― Lilith Saintcrow, Reckoning

“We ran and the ghost of Graves ran with us.”
― Lili St. Crow, Defiance

“Answer this question very carefully, kid. Are you a virgin?"
The silence was so long I thought I was going to have to ask him again.
"What the hell?" He sounded honestly perplexed.
"Yes or no? Are you a virgin?" I lost control halfway through. My voice spiraled up into a scream... "Sonofabitch answer me!"
"Yes!" he screamed back. "Yes, I'm a fucking virgin, don't shoot me goddammit fucking please!”
― Lili St. Crow, Strange Angels

“But how nice it would be to know that some good Yankee woman - And there must be SOME good Yankee women. I don’t care what people say, they can’t all be bad! How nice it would be to know that they pulled weeds off our men’s graves and brought flowers to them, even if they were enemies. If Charlie were dead in the North it would comfort me to know that someone - And I don’t care what you ladies think of me,” her voice broke again, “I will withdraw from both clubs and I’ll — I’ll pull up every weed off every Yankee’s grave I can find and I’ll plant flowers, too — and — I just dare anyone to stop me!”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“As they prepared themselves to go ashore no one doubted in theory that at least a certain percentage of them would remain on the island dead, once they set foot on it. But no one expected to be one of these. Still it was an awesome thought and as the first contingents came struggling up on deck in full gear to form up, all eyes instinctively sought out immediately this island where they were to be put, and left, and which might possibly turn out to be a friend's grave.”
― James Jones, The Thin Red Line

“A lot of corpses woke up every morning from their graves. Stood in front of the mirror and wore the masks which made them look alive. Stuck in the vicious circle of death. Scared to break out and scared of falling into the infinite pit of darkness, they beat down their souls that were fighting for an escape, mercilessly every day. They walked out into the world with pain, only to return back to the home, which did not feel like a home anymore, again in the night. They removed their masks in front of the mirror, stared into those empty eyes and walked back to their graves silently, with the fear of waking up again next day and with nothing to celebrate in their heart.”
― Akshay Vasu, The Abandoned Paradise: Unraveling the beauty of untouched thoughts and dreams

“I unbury the past
so that I can name the graves.”
― Laura Gentile, Daughterbody I: a self-exorcism through poetry

“Death, distance, and time, shall each one of them dig graves for your affections; but this you do not know, nor can know, until the story of your life is ended.”
― Ik Marvel, Dream Life

“What is the present if not the graveyard of the past where, for each of our deeds we dig a grave. Everything we do today will be buried there. The good deeds rest in peace, while the bad ones rise from the graves to haunt us.”
― Mladen Đorđević, Svetioničar - Pomračenje

“Maybe we are living already inside our own graves.”
― Laura Chouette

“It is strange how, once graves are broken and overgrown in this way, then the people in them are truly dead. The Indian Christian graves at the front of the cemetery, which are still kept up by relatives, seem by contrast strangely alive, contemporary”
― Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust

“Ms. Hamilton is talking to a policeman:
Asking about ghouls in a cemetery raiding graves, I said ‘I know that in real life that doesn’t happen,’ and he got the strangest look on his face. And he said, ‘People have teeth too.’ He had been called to cemeteries where people had raided graves and done pretty much what I was writing about, except not as thoroughly. That was the moment I realized that anything I’ll ever come up with on paper has already been done.
-- interview in Locus magazine, 2000”
― Laurell K. Hamilton

“Moments passed like the lives of the dead. Who knew how many had died in that explosion? The Order wouldn't stay long enough to count. Names would be ticked off from a list later, and their passing wouldn't seem quite so bad on the page. Yet as people fell, the counters rose, and the anger rose in those who remained.”
― Dean F. Wilson, Hopebreaker

“Does 5G really mean five times more graves?”
― Steven Magee

“For as long as anyone could remember, the land beyond the western gate in the town wall had been common ground, bisected by a narrow, meandering path tramped out by the shoes of short-cutters. To the left of this natural boundary line were buried the bodies of the executed and those who had died in prison; to the right lay the mass graves into which the town's poor were sunk. Both sides bulged with grave mounds, like the tiered crowns of steamed bread with which wealthy families celebrated their birthdays.”
― Xun Lu, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun

“In the black eye sockets of the dead, and over the thousands of molehills spread throughout the plains, the snow fell noiselessly. Only the bandy-legged wolf, wandering over my footprints among the crosses on the graves, did not leap over the cemetery walls, on this long night.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“There's nothing left holy in the world for you. Herods!”
― Valentin Rasputin, Farewell to Matyora

“Death Demands A Recount by Stewart Stafford

The premature burial bell rings,
The body six feet below is alive,
Purgatory's choking siren fades,
Only darkness hears the bell peal.

Even if some listeners reacted,
A creeping terror stops them,
And dodging a vampire's bite,
Or the zombie’s flailing attack.

No, let the restless corpse lie,
Tighten the Reaper's icy grip,
Silence stills a memorial plot,
A blackout hush, no reprieve.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“And afterwards the People did wander over that Country of Silence, and made visit and honour to their Ancestors, if such were deserving.”
― William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land

“A Jewish proverb says that mothers hold their children's hands for a short time, but their hearts, forever...
In Bila Tserkva, mothers could not sing dirge for their children, and children could not lay flowers on their mothers' graves: it was exactly what racist fascism wanted.
But racist fascism failed to separate mothers from their children. The mass grave that turned into a pool of blood had brought them together. So, the mothers' hands were on their children's hearts, and the children's hearts in their mothers' hands, forever.

-To be tried as a Jew-”
― Jeyhun Aliyev Silo

“Set within the sea of stones were little oval buildings, like beehives without openings. Marra knew at once that they were graves.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“They have been busy digging a grave for you. Not knowing that their own time of death is set to be right after they're done digging. Shush! Don't lift even a finger because they'll be resting in the same grave that they've been digging for you. Your order of protection is far from expirying. You're fully covered.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Your order of protection is far from expirying. You're fully covered.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“That was a perilous area. . .Graves could be anywhere and undoubtedly are. We walk over history, unaware, every day in all places. We sleep atop it. When we rest our heads at night, we've no way of knowing who may have been laid to rest beneath us.”
― Lisa Wingate, Shelterwood

“Even when she is excavating the remains of people who died thousands of years ago,she thinks that she can tell when death had been from unnatural causes. A grave is a footprint of disturbance, that's what she told Nelson, and she thinks that the disturbance stays in the air–and in the land–for a very long time.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Ghost Fields

“Back in her room, she takes one last look out of her window. The marsh whispers with a sudden breeze, an owl hoots and she hears another night bird answer. The liminal zone, that's what Erik used to call it–the bridge between life and death. This underground world described by Nelson seems another in-between place, a waiting area between life on earth and death in the grave. Why do we bury bodies underground? So they will rise again. Ruth pulls the curtains and gets into bed.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit