He seemed dead, but perhaps “dead” meant something different. Perhaps it meant something less permanent.

Death is a state of mind — -many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.

Perhaps they were dead and imagined they were living? Perhaps everyone was dead? Perhaps he’d always been dead? That what he’d always assumed was life was actually death?

Sometimes dead is better

When you're dead you're dead.

The dead shook off their rust of living and seized up steel. Their lips quivered with the defiance of innocents, with manipulations of politicians and their interchangeable dreams, and with the insanity of thugs who don't even know for which parties they commit their atrocities.

"There're are worse things than being dead." (p253)

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

To die is to wander.

He hadn’t been religious. He’d believed that death was it. When you died you were dead, like a squished bug or drowned rat, and your immortality was in the minds of those you left behind.

Death is psychosomatic.

It is one of the many evils resulting from the absurdly erroneous teaching as to conditions after death which is unfortunately current in our western world, that those who have recently shaken off this mortal coil are usually much puzzled and often very seriously frightened at finding everything so different from what their religion had led them to expect. The mental attitude of a large number of such people was pithily voiced the other day by an English general, who three days after his death met one of the band of helpers whom he had known in physical life. After expressing his great relief that he had at last found someone with whom he was able to communicate, his first remark was: “But if I am dead, where am I? For if this is heaven I don’t think much of it; and if it is hell, it is better than I expected.”

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

There's some that came here never believing they were dead. They insisted all the way that they were alive, it was a mistake, someone would have to pay; made no difference. There's others who longed to be dead when they were alive, poor souls; lives full of pain or misery; killed themselves for a chance of a blessed rest, and found that nothing had changed except for the worse, and this time there was no escape; you can't make yourself alive again.