Corpses Quotes

“This little piggy went to Hades
This little piggy stayed home
This little piggy ate raw and steaming human flesh
This little piggy violated virgins
And this little piggy clambered over a heap of dead bodies to get to the top”
― Neil Gaiman

“Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.”
― Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

“Darling, people pay you less attention when you don't leave a trail of bodies in your wake.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“A lot of corpses woke up every morning from their graves. Stood in front of the mirror and wore the masks which made them look alive. Stuck in the vicious circle of death. Scared to break out and scared of falling into the infinite pit of darkness, they beat down their souls that were fighting for an escape, mercilessly every day. They walked out into the world with pain, only to return back to the home, which did not feel like a home anymore, again in the night. They removed their masks in front of the mirror, stared into those empty eyes and walked back to their graves silently, with the fear of waking up again next day and with nothing to celebrate in their heart.”
― Akshay Vasu, The Abandoned Paradise: Unraveling the beauty of untouched thoughts and dreams

“I don't necessarily love rotting bodies, but there's a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? I love looking at those things, just as much as I like to look at a close-up of some tree bark, or a small bug, or a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie. You get in close and the textures are wonderful.”
― David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

“The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Pedro of Portugal's rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, Inez de Castro, who swayed beside him on his travels, leather-brown and skeletal, crowned with lace and gold circlet, hung about with chains of diamonds and pearls, her bone-fingers fantastically ringed.”
― A. S. Byatt

“You are despicable and such cowards that you won't even share your dead bodies with the Earth, but put them inside wooden and metal coffins to "protect" them. From what?”
― Carl Abrahamsson, Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth

“She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes.”
― Emmanuelle de Maupassant, The Gentlemen's Club

“As if on cue, a line of silhouettes emerged from behind a desert scrub—shapes that moved like cats. They wandered through the landscape of corpses, touching each with a gentle nudge. They grew closer, and it became clear that Chuluum was leading the other cats on their sorrowful homage, giving the fallen librarians the honor they deserved.”
― Rahma Krambo, Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria

“Two tiny corpses, one male and the other female, rattle around that enormous closet in my bedroom. Though deceased, still they are quick enough to hide themselves whenever I need to enter the closet to retrieve something.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“Poor little corpses! It was too bad they were dead. He couldn't play with them. Even though they really stank. He couldn't stand the smell. They deserved to die for smelling so bad.”
― Arturo Arias, After the Bombs

“In death, corpses don't hold themselves together. They no longer have to play by the living's rules.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Summerset wasn't even where he's supposed to be so I could insult him and start the ditching."

"I was home even earlier, and told him to go out with some of his friends."

"Corpses don't have friends, they have other corpses.”
― J.D. Robb, Brotherhood in Death

“Do vegetarians rot more rapidly than meat-eaters?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The deceased are beyond beautiful, but only because they are so emptied of worry. Everything tense or unlikable is gone. Like a shopping center in the middle of the night, they have lost all the chaos and clatter.”
― Ella Baxter, New Animal

“We set to work to bury people. We pushed them into the sides of the trench but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like people in a badly made bed. Hands were the worst; they would escape from the sand, pointing, begging - even waving! There was one which we all shook when we passed, saying, 'Good morning', in a posh voice. Everybody did it. The bottom of the trench was springy like a mattress because of all the bodies underneath.”
― Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village

“THOMAS
Guilty
Of mankind. I have perpetrated human nature.
My father and mother were accessories before the fact,
But there’ll be no accessories after the fact,
By my virility there won’t! Just see me
As I am, like a perambulating
Vegetable, patched with inconsequential
Hair, looking out of two small jellies for the means
Of life, balanced on folding bones, my sex
No Beauty but a blemish to be hidden
Behind judicious rags, driven and scorched
By boomerang rages and lunacies which never
Touch the accommodating artichoke
Or the seraphic strawberry beaming in its bed:
I defend myself against pain and death by pain
And death, and make the world go round, they tell me
By one of my less lethal appetites:
Half this grotesque life I spend in a state
Of slow decomposition, using
The name of unconsidered God as a pedestal
On which I stand and bray that I’m best
Of beasts, until under some patient
Moon or other I fall to pieces,
Like a cake of dung. Is there a slut would
Hold this in her arms and put her lips against it?


JENNET
Sluts are only human. By a quirk
Of unastonished nature, your obscene
Decaying figure of vegetable fun
Can drag upon a woman’s heart, as though
Heaven were dragging up the roots of hell.
What is to be done? Something compels us into
The terrible fallacy that man is desirable
and there’s no escaping into truth. The crimes
And cruelties leave us longing, and campaigning
Love still pitches his tent of light among
The suns and moons. You may be decay and a platitude
Of flesh, but I have no other such memory of life.
You may be corrupt as ancient applies, well then
Corruption is what I most willingly harvest.
You are Evil, Hell, the Father of Lies; if so
Hell is my home and my days of good were a holiday:
Hell is my hill and the world slopes away from it
Into insignificance. I have come suddenly
Upon my heart and where it is I see no help for.”
― Christopher Fry

“(One difference between old-style autocrats, such as Caesar, Louis XIV, or Napoleon, and their totalitarian successors is the replacement of the marble statue in the middle of the square with an embalmed corpse.) [George Packer, "History: Influence on Humanity"].”
― Catie Marron, City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World

“Looking at the corpses and the crowds relentlessly searching I understood that a body could not be laid to rest until it was matched to a name.”
― Roger Jefferies, Shoal: A Thanet Writers Anthology

“HAMM: You stink already. The whole place stinks of corpses.
CLOV: The whole universe.
HAMM: [Angrily.] To hell with the universe! [Pause.] Think of something.
CLOV: What?
HAMM: An idea, have an idea. [Angrily.] A bright idea!”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“The smell of roasted flesh permeated the air for hours afterwards with the stench of oily-black smoke from the blazing vehicles . Gräbner's body was never identified among all the other carbonized corpses.”
― Antony Beevor, Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944

“He [Tom Klay]'d watched people tend to corpses thousands of times. They straightened eyeglasses, fixed neckties, picked away bits of makeup, adjusted stray hair. They leaned into caskets and kissed the dead on the forehead, the cheeks, the lips. They spoke to them.

Klay had seen so many dead he couldn't remember his first, but he didn't understand it. A corpse was not a person. It was a thing--an abandoned thing, no more worthy of sentiment than was a dead person's shoes or toothbrush.”
― Bryan Christy, In the Company of Killers

“Please try to remember.

100% of people finding themselves in hell, would accept, if offered the chance to go back in time, to warn themselves or others, about the grotesque existance which is hell. Begging. Pleading.

And, I'm not so sure about time travel.”
― Adaeristw

“The buzzing flies and screaming survivors had long since replaced the beating war-drums.

The killing field was now a tangled sprawl of corpses, human and faerie alike, interrupted only by the broken wings jutting toward the grey sky or the occasional bulk of a felled horse.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin

“My aching, bloodied fingers dug into dented armour and clammy, stiff flesh as I heaved away the last of the High Fae corpses piled atop the fallen Illyrian soldier.

The dark hair, the golden-brown skin... The same as Cassian's.

But it was not Cassian's death-grey face that gaped at the sky.

My breath whooshed from me, my lungs still raw from roaring, my lips dry and chapped.

I needed water- badly. But nearby, another set of Illyrian wings poked up from the piled dead.

I mumbled and lurched toward it, letting my mind drift someplace dark and quiet while I righted the twisted neck to peer at the face beneath the simple helm.

Not him.

I picked my way through the corpses to another Illyrian.

Then another. And another.

Some I knew. Some I didn't. Still the killing field stretched onward under the sky.

Mile after mile. A kingdom of the rotting dead.

And still I looked.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin

“Hiroshima was a decimated “death laboratory” littered with the corpses of “human guinea pigs”…”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“Yes, you never know when you might need pictures of corpses,' agrees Bogdan.”
― Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice

“He had tried sculpting in other materials - in clay, marble, wood, and bronze - but corpses were the only medium that really sang under his fingers.”
― Noah Medlock, A Botanical Daughter

“Why else would someone have buried her behind a deserted gas station somewhere north of hoot and south of holler?”
― Stephen King