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1 " Brandon, until this very moment, the world and the people in it have always been dark and incomprehensible to me, and I've tried to clear my way with logic and superior intellect, and you've thrown by own words right back in my face; you've given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of, and you tried to twist them into a cold logical excuse for your ugly murder!Tonight you've made me ashamed of every concept I've ever had, of superior or inferior beings, but I thank you for that shame, because now I know that we're each of us a separate human being, Brandon, with the right to live and work and think as individuals, but with an obligation to the society that we live in. By what right do you dare say that there's a superior few to which you belong? By what right did you dare decide that that boy in there [he's referencing the dead body of " David," lying in a trunk in the middle of the room] was inferior and therefore could be killed?Did you think you were God Brandon? Is that what you thought when you choked the life out of him? Is that what you thought when you served food from his grave! I don't know what you thought or what you are, but I know what you've done—YOU'VE MURDERED! You've strangled the life of a fellow human being who could live and love as you never could... and never will again! "
2 " How good it is when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this is the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood!And in sexual intercourse that it is no more than the friction of a membrane and a spurt of mucus ejected. How good these perceptions are at getting to the heart of the real thing and penetrating through it, so you can see it for what it is!This should be your practice throughout all your life: when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason: when you are most convinced that your work is important, that is when you are most under its spell. "
― Marcus Aurelius
3 " Her womb from her body. Separation. Her clitoris from her vulva. Cleaving. Desire from her body. We were told that bodies rising to heaven lose their vulvas, their ovaries, wombs, that her body in resurrection becomes a male body.The Divine Image from woman, severing, immortality from the garden, exile, the golden calf split, birth, sorrow, suffering. We were told that the blood of a woman after childbirth conveys uncleanness. That if a woman's uterus is detached and falls to the ground, that she is unclean. Her body from the sacred. Spirit from flesh. We were told that if a woman has an issue and that issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be impure for seven days. The impure from the pure. The defiled from the holy. And whoever touches her, we heard, was also impure. Spirit from matter. And we were told that if our garments are stained we are unclean back to the time we can remember seeing our garments unstained, that we must rub seven substances over these stains, and immerse our soiled garments.Separation. The clean from the unclean. The decaying, the putrid, the polluted, the fetid, the eroded, waste, defecation, from the unchanging. The changing from the sacred. We heard it spoken that if a grave is plowed up in a field so that the bones of the dead are lost in the soil of the field, this soil conveys uncleanness. That if a member is severed from a corpse, this too conveys uncleanness, even an olive pit's bulk of flesh. That if marrow is left in a bone there is uncleanness. And of the place where we gathered to weep near the graveyard, we heard that planting and sowing were forbidden since our grieving may have tempted unclean flesh to the soil. And we learned that the dead body must be separated from the city.Death from the city. Wilderness from the city. Wildness from the city. The Cemetery. The Garden. The Zoological Garden. We were told that a wolf circled the walls of the city. That he ate little children. That he ate women. That he lured us away from the city with his tricks. That he was a seducer and he feasted on the flesh of the foolish, and the blood of the errant and sinful stained the snow under his jaws.The errant from the city. The ghetto. The ghetto of Jews. The ghetto of Moors. The quarter of prostitutes. The ghetto of blacks. The neighborhood of lesbians. The prison. The witch house. The underworld. The underground. The sewer. Space Divided. The inch. The foot. The mile. The boundary. The border. The nation. The promised land. The chosen ones. "
― Susan Griffin , Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her
4 " In a materialistic society, the dead body of a rich man’s dog is regarded as a corpse; that of a poor man, a carcass. "
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
5 " When you're writing a whodunit, the dead body is the most important character. It's the pivot point around which the plot spins. "
6 " There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck. "
― Ambrose Bierce , Civil War Stories
7 " How good it is, when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this the dead body of a bird or pig. "
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations
8 " Donata Santori looked down at the dead body lying at her feet and thought, ‘Damn, that can’t be a good sign. "
― Deborah Blake , Veiled Menace (Veiled Magic, #2)
9 " How exactly does one break the news to her husband that she's standing in a closet with the dead body of one of their dinner guests? "
― Thea Harrison , Dragos Goes to Washington (Elder Races, #8.5)