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“This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It’s what actually distinguishes man from any other animal: living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive. Not necessarily the people that one knew personally, I mean the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind, this question of the company of the past, that’s what interests me, and archives are a kind of site in the sense of like an archaeological site.”
― John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists

“The morgue is a Victorian update of a system established by Alfred the Great. It's the place where certain deaths are resolved - those where the cause is unclear or is the result of some intended or accidental violence. The bodies are almost always victims in some way - of crime, suicides and car crashes, but also victims of loneliness. It's where you go if you die alone in your flat and your body lies undisturbed for days. It's where you go if no one knew you were dying and no GP attended your final hours. It's where you go if no loved one held your hand as you slipped away. In one way or another, then, all the people who pass through this room are the people who die screaming.”
― Stephen Armstrong

“He could quite quickly become detached from the nuances of common human emotion. Particularly if he was engaged in some aspect of a scientific problem or research. His work excluded any consideration for the feelings of those around him. And he rarely excused himself or justified his behavior. It was as if he was compelled to focus all his energy on one subject and was unaware that others did not follow his obsession.”
― Theresa Breslin, The Medici Seal

“The Maestro spoke again. "When we are not, at what point do we become?"

I could not reply. For I had grasped no shape of his thoughts. I understood neither what he said nor his intent behind it.”
― Theresa Breslin, The Medici Seal

“They never look very big on the table, the bodies. It's built to accommodate the largest frames, there's that. And they're naked. But it's something else. That parcel of the being called the soul-weighing twenty-one grams, according to the experiments of the American doctor Duncan MacDougall-takes up a surprising amount of space, like aloud voice. In its absence, the body seems to shrink”
― Yann Martel, The High Mountains of Portugal

“The seeds of our own destruction are often sown at birth or in childhood. We are too busy acquiring knowledge and living life to notice their presence. It is for our biographers, if we are of sufficient importance to have any, to highlight them to a post-mortem audience.”
― Stewart Stafford

“nous laissons à nos sympathies historiques le pas sur notre jugement esthétique. Et ce n'est que lorsqu'il gît tranquillement dans la tombe que nous offrons à un artiste les fleurs de notre approbation.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“We spend hours talking about things we hope will tell us more about who we are, like the latest self-help books we've read or those personality type quizzes that our friends post links to. We have opinions on politics and faith because we need to, since they are such a hug part of our daily lives. Me, I want to talk about rime. I want to talk about crime statistics with skepticism and unease. Because it there's one thing I've learned from seeing the inside of a dead man's skill on a bright Sunday morning, it's that at some point in our lives we could end up being something or the other: perpetrator, victim, passerby, or witness.”
― Michellan Alagao

“Courtrooms (can) be exciting arenas where combating attorneys (fight) out issues of life and death, but there (is) nothing exciting about a courtroom where tired old loves (go) to die, or to be exhumed for delayed post-mortem.”
― Helen Nielsen

“When people are gone, they cannot pretend anymore. They cannot try to adjust to the expectations that they think others have on them, and they cannot prevent anyone from finding their darkest secrets. As they are down there, naked in the morgue, who they were is up here, just as exposed and waiting for a post-mortem.”
― Sima B. Moussavian, The way they leave: A crime novella about the delusions you choose to believe in