quick and the dead

Idioms  

1. The living and the dead, as in The explosion was loud enough to wake the quick and the dead. Although quick has been used for “living” since the 9th century a.d., it survives only in this idiom and in cut to the quick, and may be obsolescent.

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Example Sentences

The choice is between the quick and the dead.

From Salon • Mar. 5, 2023

Nathan's characters — both the quick and the dead — experience hell, but the reader winds up somewhere closer to purgatory.

From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 16, 2018

In the process, the maker of “The American Monument” constructs a discreet and quick — as in the quick and the dead — photographic memorial to the creator of “American Photographs.”

From New York Times • Oct. 11, 2017

In her reply to the critics of “The First Stone,” she describes “eros” as “the quick spirit that moves between people—quick as in the distinction between ‘the quick and the dead.’

From The New Yorker • Dec. 4, 2016

The boy was thirteen and had seen enough people slumped over a plow, or stilled after childbirth, and enough drowned children to know the difference between the quick and the dead.

From "Jazz" by Toni Morrison