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Being Dead

by Jim Crace · 1999

Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. Instead, they… more

9 quotes ★ 3.72 (5,492) Fiction

Quotes from the Book

There is no remedy for death—or birth—except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.
38
A hundred years ago no one was silent or tongue-tied, as we are now, when death was in the room. They had not yet muzzled grief or banished it from daily life. Death was cultivated, watered like a plant. There was no need for whispering or mime.
3
Yet there still was love, the placid love that only time can cultivate, a love preserved by habit and by memory. Their tree had little rising sap, perhaps, but it was held firm by deep and ancient roots.
1
A book – Calvino’s Antonyms – was on the floor.
Even death (according to the town’s resurrected folklore – Mondazy’s work again) was watery. ‘We call it Fish,’ he wrote in his final memoir, published more than thirty years ago.
The Goatherd’s Ancient Wisdom. Page 68, ‘A Sorcery of Trees
The Biologist’s Valediction to his Wife’ from Offcuts by Sherwin Stephens
There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.
Passion is the work of seconds. You only have to make a god of what you most desire.

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About Jim Crace

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About the book

Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. Instead, they are battered to death by a thief with a chunk of granite. Their corpses lie undiscovered and rotting for a week, prey to sand crabs, flies, and gulls. Yet there remains something touching about the scene, with Joseph's hand curving lightly around his wife's leg, "quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."

"Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell--just look at them--that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless

Book details

First published
1999
Author
Jim Crace
Genre
Fiction
Goodreads rating
3.72 (5k ratings)

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Being Dead Being Dead Jim Crace Get the book
1999·★ 3.72 (5k)
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