Corpse Quotes

“You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Nice jewelry and a boys corpse. Oh you're so pretty.”
― Koushun Takami, Battle Royale

“The mask of art is the means through which corruption is spread. The mask makes vice seem beautiful, turns squalor and nastiness into glamorous thrill, seduces the onlooker into the game – and leaves him or her with the corpse on his hands.”
― Jennifer Birkett

“God wasn't love, couldn't be love. Because for me, love was a corpse.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Burned

“জীবিতদের কেউ মানুষ, আবার কেউ অমানুষ! আর মৃতরা শুধুই লাশ! সেখানে কোনো মনুষ্যত্ব নেই!”
― এজি মাহমুদ

“Women’s bodies are so often under the purview of men, whether it’s our reproductive organs, our sexuality, our weight, our manner of dress. There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild. I relish this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“I got the sexton, who was digging Linton’s grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there, when I saw her face again—it is hers yet—he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change, if the air blew on it...”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“It seems to me that you have two options: hide the fact that anything happened, or hide the fact that you had anything to do with it.”
― Keigo Higashino, The Devotion of Suspect X

“I saw that pain and disease existed and at the same time that they were void of sense and meaning. Among the men of the rabble I had become a creature of a strange, unknown race, so much so that they had forgotten that I had once been part of their world. I had the dreadful sensation that I was not really alive or wholly dead. I was a living corpse, unrelated to the world of living people and at the same time deprived of the oblivion and peace of death.”
― Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

“I am learning that it is important to stop sometimes, and just have a drink and a gossip with friends, even as corpses start to pile up around you. Which they have been doing a lot recently.

It's a balancing act, of course, but, by and large, the corpses will still be there in the morning, and you mustn't let it spoil your Domino's.”
― Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice

“Corpses sour you. They are bad for objectivity.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“She lit the candelabras which stood on the mantelpiece. Placed at the head of the bead, on a side-table, they looked like two burning bushes, their flames solemn and inextinguishable. But beneath that avalanche of light the dead man became hideous: the pale head displayed a whiteness more livid than the bedsheet, ghastly against the cambric of the pillow; pits of shadow were hollowed out under the eyes and his nose was villainously elongated, and even the mouth seemed wicked – his mouth, which was so very gentle!
”
― Remy de Gourmont, The Angels of Perversity

“The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes, and stiff bodies, which, when not unnaturally shrunken, were unnaturally swollen, had always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless antipathy which was something more than the physical and spiritual repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to his unusually acute sensibilities - his keen sense of the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of reselltment. What others have respected as the dignity of death had to him no existence - was altogether unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side - a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to encounter. ("A Tough Tussle")”
― Ambrose Bierce, Ghost Stories

“The face of the dead man was concealed, of course, our customs not being those of the south, where corpses are carried to the grave in open coffins, that they might – one last time before slipping into the pit – be warmed by the light of the sun.”
― Jan Neruda, Prague Tales

“In some warped way, having an embalmed body with us made perfect sense.”
― Tahir Shah, House of the Tiger King : The Quest for a Lost City

“Why don’t they use this place anymore?” Matthias had asked when they’d taken over a vast tomb at the island’s center as their hideout.

“Plague,” Kaz replied. “The first bad outbreak was more than a hundred years ago, and the Merchant Council prohibited burial within city limits. Now bodies have to be cremated.”

“Not if you’re rich,” Jesper added. “Then they take you to a cemetery in the country, where your corpse can enjoy the fresh air.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill; some sort of poisoning. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.

One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”
― Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident

“I’m getting lovelier by the hour.
I glow like a corpse in the dark.”
― Nina Cassian

“All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied comparison.”
― William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

“The New or Future Eve is emptied of all inner life and turned into a shell. The bitter irony in this is that her perfection recalls nothing so much as a corpse.”
― Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France

“A living corpse. A phrase which has hatched behind my eyes (seemingly without thought) and now lives as a hot pulsation in my brain as I walk, write, and sleep. I have been told that there is a miniature death in every breath: the millisecond after inhale and before exhale, when we hang in the hollow spaceless. This is another way of saying that we are all of us resurrected beings, and all of us not, our corpses sliding tight behind us in the vernix of birth.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“A corpse is seldom attractive.”
― Helen Nielsen

“Nor is this uncommon, as Mervyn will tell you if you ask him. He has seen all of it before many times, including the curious pull that a corpse exerts, drawing people towards it. By tomorrow already this will have changed, the body will be long gone and its permenent absence covered over with plans, arrangements, reiminiscences and time. Yes, already. The disappearance begins immediately and in a certain sense never ends.
But in the mean time there is the body, the horrible meaty fact of it [..] Fortunately she isn't heavy, the sickness hollowed her out, and it's easy to get her down the stairs and around the challenging angle at the bottom and along the passage to the kitchen.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“We are food even before we are dead.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“He was a corpse in need of a grave.”
― T. Frohock, Miserere: An Autumn Tale

“The technicians worked around him now as though they expected to launch him into space.”
― Richard Stark, The Jugger

“I had been so callous that almost nothing could break through to me. I was like a corpse, and the rebukes I received were like a defibrillator, shocking my heart and forcing it to return to some semblance of normalcy.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“There was a faint scratching. Eyes searched for the source behind dusty glasses. Nothing–
just darkness. He glanced at the body, and froze. It was still staring at him… but he’d moved. He took a step. Scratching. It was hair grating on the wood–a lifeless head turning on a lifeless neck.”
― Tony Del Degan, In River Cardinal

“Yeah, because being a corpse with a million followers is just the best.”
― Ben Oliver, The Kill Factor: for fans of Squid Game and Black Mirror