“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.”

“Death isn't funny." "Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.”

“It smelled pretty rank, but I was getting used to the smell of death, as much as anyone could get used to it.”

“Men like war: they do not hold much sway over birth, so they make up for it with death. Unlike women, men menstruate by shedding other people's blood.”

“It's so easy to wish for death when nothing's wrong with you! It's so easy to fall in love with death, and I've been all my life, and seen it's most faithful worshippers crumble in the end, screaming just to live, as if all the dark veils and the lillies and the smell of candles, and grandiose promises of the grave meant nothing. I knew that. But I always wished I was dead. It was a way to go on living”

“I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.”