Cadavers Quotes

• Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Color, Weight, Dozen

  Robert Charles Wilson (2010). “Spin”, p.59, Macmillan

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• You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.

  Mary Roach

  Persons, Cease

  Mary Roach (2004). “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers”, p.12, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.

  Mary Roach

  Eye, Airports, People

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• The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.

  Mary Roach

  Lying, Brain, Flesh

  "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers". Book by Mary Roach, 2003.

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• The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing.

  Mary Roach

  Funeral, Ordinary, Decay

  Mary Roach (2004). “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers”, p.82, W. W. Norton & Company

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• To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Yesterday, Feelings, Today

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• Germany is now a field of cadavers, soon she will be a paradise.

  Georg Buchner

  Revolution, Germany, Paradise

  "The Hessian Courier". Book by Georg Buchner, 1834.

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• It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

  Sylvia Plath

  Eggs, Black, Breakfast

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• Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Death, Bitterness, Infinity

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• In the end, oh I know,
  never, in my haggard passion,
  have I ever been such a cadaver as now
  as I take again in hand my tables of the present—
  if reality's real, but after it's been
  destroyed in the eternal and the moment by
  the obsessive idea of a shining nothingness.

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  Real, Passion, Hands

  Pier Paolo Pasolini, Norman MacAfee, Luciano Martinengo (1982). “Poems”, New York : Random House

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• I say, doctors are the profiteers of death and unclaimed cadavers that were once inhabited by homeless and wondering poets!

  Rawi Hage

  Doctors, Wonder, Homeless

  Rawi Hage (2013). “Carnival: A Novel”, p.6, W. W. Norton & Company

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• ..when I say that "he's a truly nasty man," I mean he has so thoroughly renounced everything good that he might have inside him that he's already like a corpse even though he's still alive. Because truly nasty people hate everyone, to be sure, but most of all themselves. Can't you tell when a person hates himself? He becomes a living cadaver, it numbs all his negative emotions but also all the good ones so he won't feel nauseated by who he is.

  Muriel Barbery

  Hate, Mean, Men

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• God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he
  slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream...God is dead.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Dream, Men, Somewhere Else

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• Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.

  Edward Abbey

  Book, Bed, Austen

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.32, RosettaBooks

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• It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.

  Mary Roach

  Heart, People, Waiting

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• One young woman's tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver's hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. "The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish", she wrote. "Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart.

  Mary Roach

  Heart, Thinking, Hands

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• My best friends when I was young were always doctors. I used to dress up in a white gauze helmet and go round and see babies born and cadavers cut open. This fascinated me, but I could never bring myself to disciplining myself to the point where I could learn all the details that one has to learn to be a good doctor. This is the sort of opposition: somebody who deals directly with human experiences, is able to cure, to mend, to help, this sort of thing.

  Sylvia Plath

  Baby, Cutting, Doctors

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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• Cadavers and spirits are human refuse, and they are absurdly difficult to dispose of properly. When someone dies, a small gang of specialists is required to remove and inter the body in such a way that it can always be located precisely at any time while preventing it from ever appearing again.

  Michael Cisco

  Body, Way, Spirit

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• And off we go, out onto the highway looking for a little fun. Perhaps a flatbed truck loaded with human cadavers will explode in front of a Star Trek reunion. One can only dream and hope.

  George Carlin

  Dream, Stars, Fun

  George Carlin (2015). “3 x Carlin: An Orgy of George including Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty, and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?”, p.663, Hachette UK

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• To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

  Sylvia Plath

  Dream, Baby, World

  The Bell Jar ch. 20 (1963)

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• There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heart

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Heart, Giving, Mad

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• Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

  Sylvia Plath

  Snow, Landscape, Kind

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.122, Hamilton Books

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• If we had enough cadaver organs to go around we wouldn't do living donor liver transplants because one is we don't want to put a donor at risk, but the second is that it's a more difficult surgery for the recipient because you're getting a piece of a liver rather than a whole liver. It takes you longer to recover, and it has more complications related to where we sew together the blood vessels and the bile ducts.

  John Roberts

  Blood, Risk, Together

  Source: www.ucsfbenioffchildrens.org

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• But I'm concerned about security.”  My response to that is simple: “Security is for cadavers.

  Bob Parsons

  Simple, Response, Concerned

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• Researchers measure that the average major-league pitcher puts 40 pounds of pressure on his shoulder by cocking and releasing the baseball. Curious how much more the body could take, those same researchers tested cadavers. The shoulder broke apart at just beyond 40 pounds.

  Tom Verducci

  Baseball, Average, League

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