Coroner Quotes & Sayings

I think this guy's dead," the coroner said, scooting another inch or two, to be safe.
"There's something wrong here," Tom said. They both looked at him.
"No, I'm pretty sure of it," the coroner said. "That bullet hole, for one thing. Plus, he's not breathing. That's the kind of thing we look for. — Victor J. Banis

We have copped a lot of ignorant abuse in the past, but it makes you wonder when a former state coroner openly attacks Aboriginal families who have been through hell. — Arthur Murray

And supposing the Coroner's jury returns a verdict of Wilful Murder against Alfred Inglethorp. What becomes of your theories, then?"
"They would not be shaken because twelve stupid men had happened to make a mistake! — Agatha Christie

I was at our beautiful home in Martha's Vineyard, near Boston, sitting on the porch looking at the ocean when I got a phone called and was asked, 'Would I like to do 'CSI'?' A week later, I'm at a coroner's office in Las Vegas, participating in a quadruple autopsy. — Ted Danson

Whenever a husband and a wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest. — H.L. Mencken

I saw so many kids 22, 19, with holes the size of a dime and they're dead. It's a gunshot and of course those kids thought they were as tough as nails, they never expected to be dead but they're gone. It's kinda nice to walk out of the County Coroner's Office with a couple of sayings, you know? "You're not so tough being dead on a morgue table." — Milo Ventimiglia

Can you just saw his arm off while we're here and get me loose? (Amanda)
I could do that, but he needs his more. I'd cut yours off before I did his. (Tate)
Oh, great, what are you, his Igor? (Amanda)
Wrong movie, Igor was Frankenstein's flunky. Renfield is the one you're thinking of, and no, I'm not Renfield. Name's Tate Bennett. Parish coroner. (Tate) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I, Alexander B. Campbell, make this statement of the cause of my death to relieve the coroner of the necessity of an inquest, and also let my friends know the motive that led me to take my own life. — Alex Campbell

Coroner's inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn't been to the sea-shore in ten years. — Leonard Cohen

Put the penis schematic away, he told the coroner. — Paul Collins

The Coroner said graciously:
"I have heard of you, M. Poirot," and Poirot made an unsuccessful attempt to look modest. — Agatha Christie

They come together like the Coroner's Inquest, to sit upon the murdered reputations of the week. — William Congreve

There are cases where examinations are admitted, namely, before the coroner, and before magistrates in cases of felony. That appears to me to go rather in support of the general rule than in destruction of it. Every exception that can be accounted for is so much a confirmation of the rule that it has become a maxim, Exceptio probat regulam. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

On Monday, May 10, the coroner's jury issued its finding: that the submarine's officers and crew and the emperor of Germany had committed "willful and wholesale murder." Half an hour later a message arrived from the Admiralty, ordering Horgan to block Turner from testifying. Horgan wrote, "That august body were however as belated on this occasion as they had been in protecting the Lusitania against attack. — Erik Larson

Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion when a levee gave way. The coroner, for reasons unstated, recorded just two deaths. — Bill Bryson

The coroner announced heart failure as the cause of death, but William Stoner always felt that in a moment of anger and despair Sloane had willed his heart to cease, as if in a last mute gesture of love and contempt for a world that had betrayed him so profoundly that he could not endure in it. — John Williams

You are a steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer we could call you a scrupulous coroner. — Wally Lamb

Other duties become pressing and absorbing and crowd our prayer. "Choked to death" would be the coroner's verdict in many cases of dead praying if an inquest could be secured on this dire, spiritual calamity. — Edward McKendree Bounds

I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up — Lenny Bruce

Open Secret boasts a nifty plot and, in Coroner Fortin, a fascinating protagonist who will likely be around for a long time. Deryn Collier is a talent to watch, — Giles Blunt

sister died of the dropsy which had long afflicted her." "That will be for a coroner to decide. — Arthur Conan Doyle

I DRANK FOR YEARS, and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven. There's something purely foolish about attending any large gathering of men and women without benefit of some kind of philter or magic dust to blind you and weaken your critical faculties. — Michael Chabon

Barbara Mitchell of the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner's Office and F. James Gregris, former deputy coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, were — Martin J. Smith

It won't be whiskey, won't be meth
It'll be your name on my last breath
If divorce or death ever do us part
The coroner will call it a broken heart — The Band Perry

Children have very little voice, and the coroner's inquest is about Luke's voice, and making sure Luke is heard and respected and honoured. I don't want him to have died in vain. — Rosie Batty

The English youth's face simply showed a lively surprise, but nothing more. He went swinging along valleyward again, as if he did not know he had just swindled a coroner — Mark Twain

The easiest job in the world has to be coroner. Surgery on dead people. What's the worst thing that could happen? If everything went wrong, maybe you'd get a pulse. — Dennis Miller

The dead man's face was pale and bloodless. The fierce white lights in the morgue showed up every detail mercilessly and every last pore and pock-mark was revealed, the history of a life, now reduced to a mere handful of scars.
'Always nice to see you Mark, but what brings you in so late on Friday afternoon?' Lambert said nothing, staring at Petrie's corpse, before turning to the coroner. John Humby was older and getting close to retirement and the two had been friends for a very long time. Humby resembled a large blood-hound, the more so the older he got and he was smiling over at Lambert, who was still thinking about the murder. — Stevie O'Connor

People who attempted to end their lives, no matter how amateurishly they might do so at first, often got better at it, with the result that on the third, fourth or sixth try, they ended up on a slab with a coroner poking around their remains. — David Baldacci

I understand there was some controversy about the coroner's ruling concerning Josephus Jones's — Wally Lamb

There are probably more of us. If we're all zombies, then
there's got to be more. I say we go up to the cemetery and find out."
"Can we get soda on the way?"
Nothing washes down brains better than a can of Coca Cola and a little shameless product placement. (Hey, the undead do have an image problem.)
"Soda and cemeteries! Soda and cemeteries!" they chanted. "And braaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiins!"
"Hey Bernie, you're getting pretty good at that."
"Okay, you try."
"Braaa - " the zombie belched, " - aiiinsss."
Earl heaved the coroner's body out of the way. They headed off for the cemetery, each trying furiously to perfect their own, unique and personal call for brains like an undead choir, out of tune.
"Braaaaiiiiins!" "Braaiiiiiiiinns!" "Braaaaaaaaaains!" "Bray-uns."
"That was just awful." ...Away into the night. — Daniel Younger

During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I[urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enactingthat all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner's jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman. — George Bernard Shaw

I had this fantasy of becoming a neurosurgeon. You know, the normal Jewish boy fantasy, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon for some reason. So I started in this unpleasant way. I was an assistant to the coroner, opening up corpses, taking the innards out, opening skulls, taking the brains out. — Joseph Brodsky

In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision ... Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News. 'Tragic Death of "Promising" Young Man.' ... The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Flinn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' ... The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide's reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner? — Julian Barnes

Dammit, I'm dying here.

No, worse, I'm already dead. Wheel me off to the fucking coroner's office, and mark down cause of death: Keely's dirty mind and miraculous cunt. — Roxy Sloane

The horror genre is my personal favorite. But then again, I was the kid who read coroner books for fun. — Candace Kita

However contradictory the coroner's report - whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death - isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience. — J.D. Salinger

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

To sweeten the hours we share scandals from the city, how curators removed an elephant's heart from the museum because it began beating when anyone in love looked at it, how the coroner found minnows swimming in a drowned girl's lungs. — Traci Brimhall

You better wake up before it's too late, or they'll be doing your makeup down at the coroner's place. — Kool Moe Dee

The Coroner had cleaned the body so well that there were no visible infections, but the shape of the wounds was enough if you knew what you were looking for: a series of wounds similar to the others, but irregular and distorted as if they'd been stretched out of shape. Just like a bedsore, but smaller. There were only a few ways that kind of thing would happen to an ordinary wound, and only one of them would result in tissue gas. Somehow, by accident or by design, these wounds had been infected with human waste. — Dan Wells

Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take anymore, and then it's off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become. — Nick Hornby

apparently Papa had mistakenly wheeled the wrong patient (heavily sedated from surgery) to the morgue. The patient later woke up, nearly frozen and surrounded by corpses, and was only discovered three hours later, screaming, by the coroner. — Carey Nachenberg

A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived). — David Edelstein