"There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the room..."
- Mary Roach
"Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito."
- Paul Kalanithi
"It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat."
"compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams..."
"cadavers' intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs....."