All the Living and the Dead Quotes

“Life is meaningful because it ends. We are brief blips on a long timeline, colliding with other people, other unlikely collections of atoms and energy that somehow existed at the same time we did. Even in the best of circumstances, being reanimated could result in a permanent homesickness for a time and a place you cannot return to. A time and a place that no longer exists. But if none of this is hurting anybody, if it helps these people live and it helps them die, I see no reason to deprive them of their experiment, or to mock it. I like their optimism but I do not share it. We do what we can to get by, it's a lullaby on a deathbed.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“You need to be able to separate the shock of seeing death from the shock of grief,”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“We’ve always had death. We’ve just avoided its gaze. We hide it so we can forget it, so we can go on believing it won’t happen to us. But during the pandemic, death felt closer and possible, and everywhere – to everyone. We are the survivors of an era defined by death. We will have to move the furniture of our minds to accommodate this newly visible guest.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation Into the Death Trade

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“To get deliberately pregnant feels like the most hopeful, reckless thing you can do to your heart. Parenthood, from what I can see, must be a mess of love and terror”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“We’ve all got our own stories behind what happens. You can’t say someone who’s had a miscarriage at ten weeks is not as important as somebody that’s had a stillbirth at term, or a baby that’s lived for two days,’ she says, placing the wooden box back in the cupboard alongside the others. ‘There’s so much that’s misunderstood about pregnancy loss. The perception that you can just try again makes that little life seem not as important.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation Into the Death Trade

“On average, 6,324 people in the world die every hour – that’s 151,776 every day, about 55.4 million a year.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“There she was, rising from the deep, dragging something from our subconscious and showing it to us on the news, telling us that pretending it didn't happen is not the same as grieving.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“We follow the tail-lights of Jerry’s Kia to Red Lobster for dinner, another brightly lit American chain island in a car-park ocean. Walk through the front doors and before you’re shown a table, you meet the inmates: a tank of condemned lobsters awaiting execution, little rubber handcuffs around their immovable claws, walls of cloudy Perspex dividing up their prison cells. They stare up at us, unblinking. ‘Pick one,’ says Jerry, grinning. I stand there, Caligula in a cagoule, choosing which one is going to die. They crawl over each other to get a better look at us.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“One of them, taken of a young woman pulled from the Seine in the early 1800s, is now the most kissed face in the world, appearing on the very first CPR training doll, Resusci Anne, in 1960. Albert Camus, who kept a copy of the mask, called her the drowned Mona Lisa.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“All this might sound like the makings of another Jeffrey Dahmer, but an interest in death doesn’t always lead down the same path. Terry was looking for the life in the body, the thing that electrified the parts.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“this scene was not shocking or sad, because every single person wanted some good to come from their death, and this was what they chose. Here was a picture of profound generosity and hope, framed by the rubber seal of a heavy-duty silver door.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“Back in late March 2020, standing in the Rose Garden -- hundreds of thousands of deaths ago -- President Donald Trump said, "I wish we could have our old life back. We had the greatest economy that we've ever had, and we didn't have death."

We've always had death. We've just avoided its gaze. We hide it so we can forget it, so we can go on believing it won't happen to us. But during the pandemic, death felt closer and possible, and everywhere -- to everyone. We are the survivors of an era defined by death. We will have to move the furniture of our minds to accommodate this newly visible guest.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“As a viewer of death, the crucial element is context: we need to know what happened or they float loose in our memories as unmoored horror, the effects of which might be accumulative fear or numbness, depending on who you are.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“Without a body, you are caught in a twilight of death, without the complete darkness you need to reach acceptance”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation Into the Death Trade

“Death shows us what is buried in the living. By shielding ourselves from what happens past the moment of death we deny ourselves a deeper understanding of who we truly are.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“Three months after the flames were extinguished, Kenyon workers, still combing through the charred remains, found a fish tank in the blackened tower. Somehow, despite the lack of food, electricity to oxygenate their water, and the twenty-three dead fish floating belly up above them, seven fish still lived. The family from the flat were contacted but were unable to house them in their current situation, so with their blessing, one of the Kenyon staff adopted the fish. They even managed to breed, resulting in the most unlikely thing to rise from the ashes of a burned building: a baby fish. They called it Phoenix.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation Into the Death Trade

“To get deliberately pregnant feels like the most hopeful, reckless thing you can do to your heart. Parenthood, from what I can see, must be a mess of love and terror.”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead