“Stone dead," said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid.”

“Hey, thanks for stopping by," Howard said. "I'd offer you some tea and cookies, but all we have is boiled mole and artichokes. Plus, we kind of have a dead girl in the living room.”

“Bruges was his dead wife. And his dead wife was Bruges. The two were united in a like destiny. It was Bruges-la-Morte, the dead town entombed in its stone quais, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them.”

“The poor man is incapacitated from showing the virtue of generosity to anyone, though he may possess it in the highest degree; and gratitude that consists of disposition only is a dead thing, just as faith without works is dead.”

“Not easy to state the change you made.If I'm alive now, I was dead,Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”

“Prudence's flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone.”