All That Remains Quotes

“but to be perfectly honest, I have never been spooked by the dead. It is the living who terrify me. The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“Fear of death is often a justifiable fear of the unknown; of circumstances beyond our personal control which we cannot know and for which we cannot prepare.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“The stark truth is, of course, that grief never dies. The American counsellor Lois Tonkin reminds us that loss isn’t something we ‘get over’, and it doesn’t necessarily lessen, either. It remains at the core of us and we just expand our lives around it, burying it deeper from the surface. So with time it may become more distant, more compartmentalised and therefore easier to manage, but it does not go away.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“Our greatest conflicts and barriers exist in our minds and in the way we deal with our fears. It is pointless even to try to control that which cannot be controlled. What we can manage is how we approach and respond to our uncertainties.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“As the writer and scientist Isaac Asimov put it: ‘Life is pleasant, death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“Humans belong to the group of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar system-dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.’ It is strangely comforting to be granted tacit permission to make mistakes just because we are human.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“Humans belong to the group of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar system-dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“All in all, the dead are a whole lot less trouble than the living”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“I want to be able to recognise death, to hear her coming, to see her, to touch her, smell her and taste her; to undergo the assault on all of my senses and, in my last moments, to understand her as completely as is humanly possible.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“Since there is no way we can ultimately prevent it, perhaps our time would be better spent focusing on improving and savouring the period between our birth and our death: our life.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“We don't all need to be geniuses; some of us just need to practical applicators and adapters.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“Death is not the greatest loss in life.
The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“The anthropologist who asserts absolute confidence in the sex, age, stature and ancestry of a skeleton is a dangerous and inexperienced scientist who doesn’t understand human variability.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“Granny had finished with dying, had died and was now dead – all very clear and distinct concepts in their minds. They were at ease with the finality. They know that the best memorial is a boxful of happy memories inside your head, and they know what a good death looks like.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“So we could, in theory, look at the remains of an individual and, from the isotopic signatures in the otic capsule and first molar, discover where in the world their mother was living when she was pregnant with them and the nature of her diet. We could then analyse the remainder of the adult teeth to establish where the deceased person had grown up, and then the rest of their bones to determine where they had lived for the past fifteen years or so. Finally, we could use their hair and nails to locate where they spent the last years or months of their life.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“With all our twenty-first-century sophistication, why do we still opt to take cover behind familiar, safe walls of conformity and denial, rather than opening up tot he idea that maybe death is not the demon we fear? She does not need to be lurid, brutal or rude. She can be silent, peaceful and merciful. Perhaps the answer is we don't trust her because we don't choose to get to know her, to take the trouble to in the course of our lives to try to understand her. If we did, we might learn to acccept her as an integral and fundamentally necessary part of our life's process.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“Since most of us are products of a culture and era where nobody likes to discuss death in case it encourages her to visit,”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“I think we should devise a new risk measure: the micromirth. How much more wonderful would our lives be, whether long or short, if we measured them in joy, laughter and utter nonsense? Microlives accumulate, micromorts are fatal but micromirths are priceless.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“Ronald A. Howard of Stanford University introduced his concept of a unit of risk of death, which he quantified as 1 in 100,000 and named the ‘micromort’. The principle is very straightforward: the higher the value in micromorts of a particular activity, the more dangerous it is and the greater the chance it will result in your demise. It can be applied to both daily tasks and more hazardous enterprises, and to those carrying immediate or cumulative perils.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“On a happier note, we can buy back some of our endangered time by acquiring microlives for ourselves. The microlife is a unit quantified by Sir David Spiegelhalter, of Cambridge University, as a daily gain or loss of thirty minutes of our existence.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“The Completely Wholesome Adventures of Skeleton Bob, three children’s stories he had originally written and illustrated for his nephew, Logan, recounting the adventures of a skeleton with a pink knitted skin who gets into all sorts of trouble with witches and his father, the Grim Reaper. We were touched and honoured that he entrusted them to us and allowed us to publish them on his behalf.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“Ironically, it seems that determining sex from the pelvic bones may well be achieved with greater accuracy and reliability in archaeological specimens than in recent forensic samples, because the level of sexual dimorphism required to maintain successful childbearing heritage is being lost.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“There were many sad and poignant moments when we really felt that bringing back the stories of ordinary people, not the kings, the bishops or the warriors, but the children and the working girls, demonstrated that they had not been forgotten. Their stories had just been written in a language that required interpretation by forensic anthropology.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“Another method, ‘promession’, works by freeze-drying the body in liquid nitrogen at -196°C and then vibrating it vigorously to explode it into particles.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“Death is, after all, a normal part of life and sometimes in Western cultures we hide it away when maybe what we need to do is to embrace it and celebrate it.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“Howard of Stanford University introduced his concept of a unit of risk of death, which he quantified as 1 in 100,000 and named the ‘micromort’. The principle is very straightforward: the higher the value in micromorts of a particular activity, the more dangerous it is and the greater the chance it will result in your demise.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“Pallor, Algor, Rigor and Livor.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“Mi abuela me miró con aquellos ojos profundos, negros y severos,
y me dijo que me estaba portando como una faoin (tonta). Ella nunca
iba a dejarme, ni siquiera cuando tuviera que irse al «más allá»,”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death

“It”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

“You cannot train people for the unexpected, but you can introduce the unexpected into their training.”
― Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death