Remember, you are as dispensable as the most indispensable king of kings, the mighty lord of silly worldly men.

All of my best friends are dead people. Someday I've got to figure out how that happened.

There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.

I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.

They all call me "Excuse me," even though my nametag clearly says "Jordan." It's like people don't actually exist while they're working. Workers are just tools who aren't supposed to have feelings or personalities. You don't become human until your shift is over. Until then, we're all just zombies. We're dead to the world: infected people who need to be avoided, unless, of course, someone needs to know where the paintbrushes are located.

It is as if people refused to leave their dead alone, forced them back into the light, made them keep their composure even in death.

Every time the long-forgotten people of the past are remembered, they are born again!

Deep down inside we always seek for our departed loved ones

It's not that people don't know when they'll die. It's that they don't seem to know they'll die.

Only the dead, can speak about their world.

Mama wasn't dead...exactly. They all said she was, but when Elma was small, she seen Mama creep into her room at night, half-naked, head all bloodied red like when they found her by the well that day, and Elma reckoned dead just meant pretendin' you couldn't move or breathe until nightfall when you got up and walked around like you was free.

It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat.

compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams...

cadavers' intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs.....

I don't want to see no dead body. Willie ain't in there. She put her walkin' shoes on. She gone to see the Lord.

You know that movie, where the little boy says 'I see dead people'?The Sixth Sense.Well, I see them all the time, and I'm getting tired of it. That's what's ruined my mood. Here it is, almost Christmas, and I didn't even think about putting up a tree, because I'm still seeing the autopsy lab in my head. I'm still smelling it on my hands. I come home on a day like this, after two postmortems, and I can't think about cooking dinner. I can't even look at a piece of meat without thinking of muscle fibers. All I can deal with is a cocktail. And then I pour the drink and smell the alcohol, and suddenly there I am, back in the lab. Alcohol, formalin, they both have that same sharp smell.