Morgue Quotes & Sayings

Curiously, anatomical reality in art was apparently a horrifying concept to the same men and women who lined up to see bodies at the morgue. — Deborah Davis

Look honey, I ain't buying what you're selling so get out!"
"You prefer to be lying here or in the morgue?! Things got outta hand last night but at least you're alive! If we wanted you dead, don't you think I would have drained you by now, or dragged you outta here! We are trying to help you!"
"And I'm sure Jaws was just trying to help Quint! Get out! — S.L.J. Shortt

There is also a keen pleasure (and after all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the initial blossoming of man's mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafing which allowed first of all the formation of Homo poeticus
without which sapiens could not have been evolved. "Struggle for life" indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast's crazy obsession with the search for food. You and I have frequently remarked upon that maniacal glint in a housewife's scheming eye as it roves over food in a grocery or about the morgue of a butcher's shop. Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday. — Vladimir Nabokov

The legal reporter came out of his cubicle shouting that two bodies of unidentified girls were in the city morgue. Frightened, I asked him: What age? Young, he said. They may be refugees from the interior chased here by the regime's thugs. I sighed with relief. The situation encroaches on us in silence, like a bloodstain, I said. The legal reporter, at some distance now, shouted: Not blood, Maestro,shit. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I had so many unsold murder pictures lying around my room ... I felt as if I were renting out a wing of the City Morgue. — Weegee

The "conference room" is actually the library since it's the only space other than the morgue fridge big enough to hold this many people, and Hurley and I already have dibs on that other room. As we enter the library, a cacophony of noise greets us. Everyone is talking to everyone else and most of the voices are a mere gnat's ass away from shouting. Hurley's little pup tent is safe, assuming it's still up, because our entry into the room goes unnoticed by everyone other than Izzy. — Annelise Ryan

For a moment I was dizzied by the impulse to leave her there: shove the techs' hands away, shout at hovering morgue men to get the hell out. We had taken enough toll on her. All she had left was her death and I wanted to leave her that, that at least. I wanted to wrap her up in soft blankets, stroke back her clotted hair, pull up a duvet of falling leaves and little animals' rustles. Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head. She had tried so hard to live. — Tana French

Before being taken to the Morgue, the body is left for a while on the embankment so they can try reviving it. A massive crowd gathers round the body. Those unable to see because they are at the back jostle those in front as best they can. Each thinks: "I wouldn't be drowning myself, not I." They pity the young suicide, admire him, but do not imitate him. He, however, found it quite natural to give himself death, deeming nothing on earth able to content him, and aspiring higher. — Comte De Lautreamont

I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief. — Edgar Allan Poe

I knew I was crossing a line I shouldn't. I mean taking my brothers girl, I might as well call the morgue to reserve my spot. — Michelle Lynn

M...maybe,' I stutter. 'Whatever the reason, this woman has problems. We need to be compassionate, show understanding.'

'Or slice her head off. I have plastic bags.'

Sure. We could toss her in the car beside her partner, then drive to the mall where I dumped Macey and line up all three bodies together in the Lexus. Hell, why not steal Connie's corpse from the morgue to complete the set? — Eoin Colfer

It wasn't the bent, nasty, yellow laminated four-by-six card everyone else got but a real heavyweight plastic tag embossed with my name. Jenks had one, too, and he was obnoxiously proud of it even though I was the one wearing it, right under mine. It would get me into the morgue when nothing else would. Well, besides being dead. — Kim Harrison

When I was at college there were two things I vowed I'd never do. One was go to a funeral and the other was deal with computers. And then I ended up being a computer programmer in a morgue. — Patricia Cornwell

To look at a star by glances - to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly - is to have the best appreciation of its lustre - a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. — Edgar Allan Poe

Grinning like a necrophiliac in a morgue. — Terry Pratchett

Chile, you'd better slow your role before your thirsty ass ends up in a morgue!" "Well if I do I'll be the flyest bitch there! — La'Tonya West

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

I felt a subtle sense of disappointment as I left the morgue. — Dominic Peloso

Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related. — Heinrich Heine

He liked the Leedses. He was sorry that he had been to the morgue. He thought the madman who visited them might have liked them too. But the madman would like them better the way they were now. — Thomas Harris

Joe's Morgue. You stab 'em, we bag 'em. — Ellis Leigh

WHAT IN THE WORLD, Wimsey, are you doing in this Morgue? demanded Captain Fentiman, flinging aside the Evening Banner with the air of a man released from an irksome duty. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over. — Oscar Wilde

The virus transformed the hospital at Maridi into a morgue. As it jumped from bed to bed, killing patients left and right, doctors began to notice signs of mental derangement, psychosis, depersonalization, zombie-like behavior. Some of the dying stripped off their clothes and ran out of the hospital, naked and bleeding, and wandered through the streets of the town, seeking their homes, not seeming to know what had happened or how they had gotten into this condition. — Richard Preston

Being picky isn't helping when you're trapped in a morgue. — Cameron Jace

Close your eyes,' Andre commanded. 'Nuh uh. Last time I did that I woke up in the morgue. — Laura Thalassa

Even with her audio interface turned off, it was the deepest silence she'd ever experienced. "It's so quiet here."
"Creepy, isn't it? I don't know how people can stand it."
"I think it's kind of nice."
"Yeah, like a morgue is nice. — Marissa Meyer

They put on fresh gloves and got back to business. Jazz wiped up the blood splatters in the freezer and tossed the tissues in with Howie's waste. It bothered him that he was leaving evidence behind without some sort of oxygenated bleach, those blood splatters would still show up under Luminol. Of course, the odds of anyone deciding to spray down the morgue freezer and switch on an ultraviolet light were pretty minimal, so it's not like it was evidence that anyone would ever find or use. Still: Billy Dent's First Commandment was Thou shalt not leave evidence. — Barry Lyga

Sit back and get some sleep. Oh great. So if we have an accident and I'm asleep my resistance toward fighting death will be down and I'll wake up in a morgue. — Melina Marchetta

The morgue looked deserted, though in fact it was never unattended. — Jefferson Bass

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

Dreema and you disagree. She cottons to Richmond, but you can't be weaned off Pelham. So I offer you a fair middle ground: relocate to northern Virginia. She transfers to the state morgue on Braddock Road, and you get to stay near your old beat. — Ed Lynskey

Do you know where Jason is?" she asked Dmitri when they exited the morgue. Dmitri pressed the car remote to unlock the flame red Ferrari parked in the employees-only lot. "Tired of your Bluebell already?" A tendril of champagne circled around her senses, cut with something far harder. Never had she felt that harsh edge in Dmitri's scent. She pitied the woman he took to his bed today.
"Yeah, that's it. I'm building a harem. — Nalini Singh

This time, the pathologist had a morgue assistant, a tall, skinny guy with glasses like airplane windows and a nimbus of brown hair, triple the height of Lyle Lovett's, and with a wave that rivaled the Banzai Pipeline. The hair probably had its own intelligence. It probably had its own Netflix account. It probably received regular invitations to speak at Ivy League commencement ceremonies. It probably contained a netherworld where monsters had houses. — Nina Post

The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. — Edgar Allan Poe

My mum told me to work hard. Insisted that if I did, I'd make a good life for myself. But all my hard work had gotten me dead, tortured, re-dead, kicked out of heaven, re-alived, and now squatting in the bushes behind a morgue. — Devon Monk

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends. — Jean Cocteau

The Colorman slid off the morgue slab to the cold floor. Bullets pooped from his wounds and plopped on the stone as he limped naked around the room looking for something to wear. All the dead were either naked, too ripe, or too tall for him to use their clothes, so he settled on a white mortician's coat that trailed out behind him as he went. The morgue attendant pretended not to see him as he passed, figuring that a spontaneous reanimation would require paperwork that he did not wish to fill out. — Christopher Moore

A patient on the way to surgery travels at twice the speed of a patient on the way to the morgue. Gurneys that ferry the living through hospital corridors move forward in an aura of purpose and push, flanked by caregivers with long strides and set faces, steadying IVs, pumping ambu bags, barreling into double doors. A gurney with a cadaver commands no urgency. It is wheeled by a single person, calmly and with little notice, like a shopping cart(167). — Mary Roach

He pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue . . ." ~ Al Capone — J.J. McAvoy

I've been practicin' my morgue face for when I have to go identify your body. Wanna see it? Nick said then he arranged his face in this kind of mock, sad, shocked look and slowly shook his head like a world with vigilante social workers
mystified him. — Kristen Ashley

Want to come back to the morgue with me after lunch? (Tate)
I shudder at the thought of the pickup line you must have used the night you met LaShonda. Come with me, baby, and see my collection of stiffs. (Simone) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

with this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because
it's all I have,
because I'm hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I'll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this
bullet inside me
'cause I couldn't make you love me and I'm tired of pulling your teeth. — Richard Siken

You're looking so well, darling. You really are. They've done a marvelous job. I don't know what sort of cream they've put on you down at the morgue, but I want some. Honestly, you look better than you have in years. You look like you're alive! — Wes Anderson

You want to get Capone? Here's how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. It's the Chicago way and that's how you get Capone. — David Mamet

Tell him I write of worms and corruption, because I like worms and corruption. Tell him I believe in the fundamental wickedness and worthlessness of man, & in the rot in life. Tell him I am all for cancers. And tell him, too, that I loathe poetry. I'd prefer to be an anatomist or the keeper of a morgue any day. Tell him I live exclusively on toenails and rumours. I sleep in a coffin too, and a wormy shroud is my summer suit. — Dylan Thomas

Two dead men changed the course of my life that fall. One of them I knew and the other I'd never laid eyes on until I saw him in the morgue. The first was Pete Wolinsky, an unscrupulous private detective I'd met years before through Byrd-Shine Investigations, where I'd served my apprenticeship. I worked for Ben Byrd and Morley Shine for three years, amassing the six thousand hours I needed for my license. The two were old-school private eyes, hard-working, tireless, and inventive. While Ben and Morley did business with Pete on occasion, they didn't think much of him. He was morally shabby, disorganized, and irresponsible with money. — Sue Grafton

Most people are not really scared of death. They are merely terrified of being taken to a mortuary and/or being buried or cremated and/or being forgotten. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Toxic relationships are dangerous to your health; they will literally kill you. Stress shortens your lifespan. Even a broken heart can kill you. There is an undeniable mind-body connection. Your arguments and hateful talk can land you in the emergency room or in the morgue. You were not meant to live in a fever of anxiety; screaming yourself hoarse in a frenzy of dreadful, panicked fight-or-flight that leaves you exhausted and numb with grief. You were not meant to live like animals tearing one another to shreds. Don't turn your hair gray. Don't carve a roadmap of pain into the sweet wrinkles on your face. Don't lay in the quiet with your heart pounding like a trapped, frightened creature. For your own precious and beautiful life, and for those around you - seek help or get out before it is too late. This is your wake-up call! — Bryant McGill

CINCINNATI MORGUE, AN EQUAL-OPPORTUNITY SERVICE SINCE 1966. — Kim Harrison

Mary stood beside Wilbur, waiting as he sewed Henrietta's abdomen closed. She wanted to run out of the morgue and back to the lab, but instead, she stared at Henrietta's arms and legs - anything to avoid looking into her lifeless eyes. Then Mary's gaze fell on Henrietta's feet, and she gasped: Henrietta's toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish. "When I saw those toenails," Mary told me years later, "I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she's a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we'd been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I'd never thought of it that way." — Rebecca Skloot

At the morgue, people were so desensitized that they would eat lunch in the glass walled room adjacent to the autopsy room. A viewing room. Because it had the best air conditioning in the building. So they would eat in there and maybe somebody would come in who had been found after being dead for three days and they would say: That is the exact purple I want for those drapes in the study. They didn't miss a beat. They could eat through anything. — David Sedaris

Inspector, there's no smoking allowed in here," said a uniformed officer who had been called to the scene.
Cavuto waved to the drawers [at the morgue]. "Do you think they mind?"
The officer shook his head. "No, sir."
Cavuto blew a stream of smoke at Gilbert [a dead guy]. "And him, do you think he minds?"
No, sir."
And you, Patrolman Jeeter, you don't mind, do you?"
Jeeter cleared his throat. "Uh ... no, sir."
Well, good," Cavuto said. "Look, on the side of the car, Jeeter. It says 'Protect and Serve' not 'Piss and Moan.'"
Yes, sir. — Christopher Moore

Every time I hear that somebody died I think of their body, on a steel table in a morgue somewhere. I think of how they can do nothing about it. — Laurel Nakadate

From "Lady In Waiting" in the anthology The Morgue :

Now I have yet to meet the corpse could hold up its end of a conversation, so at most I might whistle while fixin' one up 'stead of engagin' myself in any small talk that's goin' to be so one-sided anyways. But Cindy Flowers' corpse weren't no ordinary body when it walked upright, and it sure weren't ordinary just because it was lyin' before me in a pine wood box. So for the first time I felt the need to get a few things said to one of our visitors, and I leaned down to get myself real close to her face. Her eyes was closed 'cause Pa had already sewed her lids shut. — Kenneth C. Goldman

True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say? — Vaclav Havel

Then I went to the morgue and saw that those bones weren't yours, heard your voice again in my head" -his eyes closed- "and once more, nothing else mattered. — Jeaniene Frost

Not much different from the morgue. Smaller," she noted, scanning the steel worktables, the gullies on the sides, the hoses and tubes and tools. "I guess he got some of his knowledge of anatomy working here. Might have had some of his early practice sessions on corpses."
"Charming thought."
"Yeah, well, being as they were already dead - hopefully - it probably didn't upset them too much. Oh, and FYI? When my time comes, I don't want the preservatives and the stylist. You can just build a big fire, slide me in. Then you can throw yourself on the pyre to show your wild grief and constant devotion."
"I'll make a note of it. — J.D. Robb

I can't imagine how they must have felt, coming up here in their car and hoping against hope that when they got to the morgue, it would turn out to be someone else's well-loved child. — Stephen King

Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding, females in our society of 1860's England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was finding a warm responsive body amidst the cold dead forms on slabs in the Paris morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to. — Dan Simmons

As I got older, I got more Victorian and morbid. I got into things that circled around death, like skulls or morgue photographs or handwritten diaries. They can be almost haunted with all this history, and you project onto it and then it gets onto you. — Dustin Yellin

When did you last see him?" "About twenty minutes ago," I said. "In the morgue." Finlay nodded gently. "Before that?" "Seven years ago," I said. "Our mother's funeral. — Lee Child

I warn you, though, he's not the happiest corpse in the morgue. Not much of a talker, Neville Whittnish. — M.L. Stedman

EVE WASN'T SURE WHAT IT SAID ABOUT HER that she was more comfortable in the morgue than in a baby boutique. — J.D. Robb

To the family of a victim of a fatal accident, the deceased was at the wrong place at the wrong time. To the family of the morgue owner, the deceased was at the right place at the right time. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

By undue profundity, we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue — Edgar Allan Poe

When you're in morgue you're seeing life that no longer exists. It gives you an appreciation when you look someone in the eye, you shake their hand, and you hug your friends, your girlfriend, your family. It just gives you an appreciation for the life that surrounds you. At the same time you understand how fragile it is. That you don't need to be an idiot or get so angry at times. — Milo Ventimiglia

Dead bodies, I told myself, were nothing more than broken shells on a beach. It was just that in the morgue, that beach so often looked like a bad stretch of the Jersey shore. — Sibella Giorello

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

If success could heal, why do so many celebrity marriages end in divorce and celebrated artists wind up in rehab or the morgue? Why do people with a firm grip on the world's tail take their own lives or pursue suicidally risky behaviors? — Peter Coyote

So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: "Death is the cooling night." That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature. — Yu Hua

If you have to call the police on your man, then you'd better choices. If not, what have you taught him? Better him in jail this time rather than you in the morgue the next time. — Karen E. Quinones Miller

If there is a more dispiriting place in Miami than the county jail, I haven't found it . . . and I've spent a lot of time at the morgue. Approaching the jail, you can hear the anguished shouts of inmates on the upper floors, yelling through the barred windows at their wives, girlfriends, and homies below. Inside, you've got that institutional smell, as if a harsh cleanser has been laced with urine. Buzzers blare and lights flash. Steel crashes against steel as doors bang shut with the finality of a coffin closing. — Paul Levine

This is the place where death rejoices to help those who live. It's written somewhere in every morgue I've ever been in. Nice way of looking at it, isn't it? — Jane Casey

The only way I'd be caught without makeup is if my radio fell in the bathtub while I was taking a bath and electrocuted me and I was in between makeup at home. I hope my husband would slap a little lipstick on me before he took me to the morgue. — Dolly Parton

From the pancake house I drive directly to the county morgue. The contrast is not especially striking. — Carl Hiaasen

The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found. — Edgar Allan Poe

And yet, without discipline or direction, they'll end up washing cars, or unclaimed bodies in the city-state's morgue. — Sanyika Shakur

I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother's death-notice telegram or by his father's corpse in the city morgue. — Mitch Albom

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

There's a startling fact that you read somewhere: after airbags became standard in cars, statisticians noticed that the incidence of severe leg injuries increased dramatically. Think about it for a minute: Why should that be? Is there something about the way airbags inflate during collision that targets the passengers' legs, makes them more vulnerable? No. It's a matter of checks and balances. Before airbags, there were certain accidents that would have killed you; you'd be a corpse in the morgue, and no one would be paying any attention to your legs. When we change the way we do things - the way we shop for groceries or take care of our children or protect ourselves from harm - we set other changes in motion, for good or for ill. And it may be years before we figure out what we've done. — Carolyn Parkhurst

The next time I opened my eyes, I was in the morgue.
This, all by itself, is enough to really ruin your day.
I was lying on the examining table, and Butters, complete with his surgical gown and his tray of autopsy instruments, stood over me.
'I'm not dead!' I sputtered. 'I'm not dead!'
- Harry Dresden, Death Masks, Jim Butcher — Jim Butcher

I see death and tragedy all the time and nothing makes it worse than when it's totally senseless. All she needed was some niceness, some basic human kindness, and she wouldn't be on her way to the morgue and her parents wouldn't be devastated. It's heartbreaking and so senseless. — Jay Crownover

The father was dry-eyed but the mother kept erupting, like loudly, unprovoked, in a keening foreign wail that was almost like song; it sounded strangely ceremonial and impersonal, like a lament for an idea. Walter went alone to the morgue, without any idea. His love was resting beneath a sheet on a gurney of an awkward height, too high to be knelt by. Her hair was as ever, silky and black and thick, as ever, but there was something wrong with her jaw, some outrageously cruel and unforgivable injury, and her forehead, when he kissed it, was colder than any just universe could have allowed such a young person's forehead to be. The coldness entered him through his lips and didn't leave. What was over was over. His delight in the world had died, and there was no point in anything. — Jonathan Franzen

One of the reasons I love Murder is that victims are, as a general rule, dead ... I don't make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me fore a sicko or- worse-a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don't show up outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry, and you never have to worry about what it'll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there. — Tana French

Were it up to me, I would be with Lilly. Were it up to me I would be asleep in her arms. She's dead, in a cooler in some fucking morgue, and i'll never sleep in her arms again. The thought of it makes me sick, and it makes me want to join her. The rose will help me. It is time to start the killing. Time to fucking start. (James Frey, pg.39) — James Frey

If I was going to shoot you, we wouldn't be having this conversation. What's your name?" The Italian lifted his head enough to meet Sergei's gaze. "Who wants to know?" Sergei rolled his eyes. "The guy who's going to decide whether you wake up tomorrow in a hospital, a jail cell, or a morgue." He — L.A. Witt