Book of the Dead Quotes

“Gravity will get you. Life is inclined toward falling. Not standing or flying, indeed, barely sitting.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book Of The Dead

“Wit is the genius to perceive and the metaphor to express.’ Or”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book Of The Dead

“We ignore intuition at our peril,”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book Of The Dead

“When we pray we are really asking ourselves—not God—for help.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book Of The Dead

“Let's go into the living room and sit in front of the fire." She gets up from the kitchen table.

"It's seventy-five friggin' degrees outside." He gets up, too.

"Then I'll make it nice and chilly in here." She goes to a thermostat and turns on the air-conditioning. "I've always found it easier to talk in front of a fire.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book of the Dead

“Lucy is no longer embarrassed, can talk about anything with him. In the beginning, it was a different story, a horror and humiliation that a benign pituitary macroadenoma—a brain tumor-was causing an over production of the hormone prolactin that fooled her body into thinking she was pregnant. Her periods stopped. She gained weight. She didn't have galactorrhea, or begin produce milk, but had she not discovered what was wrong when she did, that would have been next.

"Sounds like you're not seeing anyone." He slides her MR films out of their envelopes, reaches up, and attaches them to light boxes.

"Nope."

"How's your libido?" He dims the lights in the office and flips on the light boxes, illuminating films of Lucy's brain. "Dostinex is sometimes called the sex drug, you know. Well, if you can get it."

She moves close to him and looks at her films. "I'm not having sur gery, Nate."

She stares dismally at the somewhat rectangular-shaped region of hy pointensity at the base of the hypothalamus. Every time she looks at one of her scans, she feels there must be a mistake. That can't be her brain. A young brain, as Nate calls it. Anatomically, a great brain, he

says, t cept for one little glitch, a tumor about half the size of a penny I don't care what the journal articles say. No one's cutting on me

How do I look? Please tell me okay," she says.

Nate compares the earlier film to the new one, studies them side by side. "Not dramatically different. Still seven to eight millimeters. Nothing in the suprasellar cistern. A little shift left to right from the infundibu lum of the pituitary stalk." He points with a pen. "Optic chiasm is clea Points again. "Which is great." He puts down the pen and holds up two fingers, starts with them together, then moves them apart to check her peripheral vision. "Great," he says again. "So almost identical. The lesion isn't growing."

"It isn't shrinking."

"Have a seat.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book of the Dead

“...she is outraged by what she discovered when she arrived hours earlier and found this morning's case had already been entered, presumably by Lucious Meddick. Unbelievably, he took it upon himself to decide the elderly woman he transported is a natural death caused by [i]cardiac and respiratory arrest[/i]. The presumptuous moron. Everybody dies of cardiac or respiratory arrest. Whether shot or hit by a car or a baseball bat, death occurs when the heart and lungs quit.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book of the Dead

“Preoccupied by whipping egg whites with a whisk and ruminating about what she must deal with today, she's startled by an ominous thud against an upstairs window.

"Please, no," she exclaims in dismay, setting down the whisk and run ning to the door.

She disarms the alarm and hurries out to the garden patio where a yel low finch flutters helplessly on old brick. She gently picks it up, and its head lolls from side to side, eyes half shut. She talks soothingly to it, strokes its silky feathers as it tries to right itself and fly, and its head lolls from side to side. It's just stunned, will suddenly recover, and it falls over and flutters and its head lolls from side to side. Maybe it won't die. Foolish wishful thinking for someone who knows better, and she carries the bird inside. In the locked bottom drawer of the kitchen desk is a locked metal box, and inside that, the bottle of chloroform.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book of the Dead

“Truth is a relief. Better not to hide something, don't you think? Funny thing about people knowing is it opens up the possibility of unexpected gifts. People reaching out when you didn't know they cared. Voices from he past talking to you again. Other voices finally shutting up. Some people finally getting out of your life.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book of the Dead

“It's not until you're dying that you begin to realize all the things in life you could have changed. You have the power to change almost anything you want.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book of the Dead

“Don’t be so selfless it makes you selfish.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book Of The Dead

“Change what you can. Don’t ever think you can’t.” “Tell me. I’ll do anything you want,” Scarpetta says. “It’s not until you’re dying that you begin to realize all the things in life you could have changed. This I can’t change.” Rose taps her chest. “You have the power to change almost anything you want.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book Of The Dead

“That’s the funny thing about choices. When you don’t have one, nobody else does, either.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book Of The Dead

“on the back steps, there's an ashtray full of cigarette butts," lucy says. "i don’t think her dna's going to be a problem. or her footprints, fingerprints. the problem's him. he knows what he's doing. these days, everybody's an expert."
"no," scarpetta says. "they just think they are.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Book of the Dead