The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.
Dead
History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don’t use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.
Each day more coalition MPs in seats outside the South East come out against George Osborne’s regional pay cut plans, and Vince Cable now claims they are dead.
I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn’t seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.
I like my subjects to be American, and not too dead, so I can interview people who knew them.
At college I’d seen my dead frog’s limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other – seen, but hadn’t believed. Didn’t dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw.
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who’s sorry for a gnat or girl?
The French, perhaps more than any other nation, cherish the memory of their dead by ornamenting their places of sepulture with the finest flowers, often renewing the garlands and replacing such plants as decay with vigorous and costly ones.
Political biography is in the doldrums. No one wants to read 800 pages or so of cradle-to-grave dead politics, especially if it’s familiar stuff and has all been written about before.