Lynda Barry Quotes

Death was in every sell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.

In the tight belly of the dead, Burrow with hungry head, And inlay maggots like a jewel.

I hate to say this, but I'll repeat it: After death, all we know that you do is stink.

Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.

A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

Corpses are more fit to be thrown out than is dung.

Dead things should be buried and not eaten.

Look at everything that exists, and observe that it is already in dissolution and in change, and as it were putrefaction or dispersion, or that everything is so constituted by nature as to die.

Your words smell of corpses.

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.

All the body wants to do biologically is decompose. Once you die, it's, 'Let me out here! I'm ready to shoot my atoms back into the universe!'

It's the decomposition that gets me. You spend your whole life looking after your body. And then you rot away.

To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.

Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.

There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.

What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go and dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing exept his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is a part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.

In the sinews of the dead there is no blood.

He lies below, correct in cypress wood, And entertains the most exclusive worms.

I saw corpses, and grew used to their unimportant look, for a dead man without any of the panoply of death is a desperately insignificant object.

Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.

I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.

The other side of the "sacred" is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.