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Nobody likes to see a body, but it's better than seeing a ghost. Bodies just make you doubt the world and the people in it. Ghosts make you doubt everything, and to doubt it in a part of the mind that has no words to answer the question, where the comforting promises you make yourself are neither believed nor even really understood.

— Michael Marshall Smith The Lonely Dead (2004)

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More quotes by Michael Marshall Smith

Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is.

The Lonely Dead (2004)

One of the big things about being a man, she'd noted, was that being good, doing the work, wasn't enough. It had to be generally acknowledged that here you were, damn well seeing to business.

The Lonely Dead (2004)

Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler, merely a message from our sponsor.

The Lonely Dead (2004)

My limited experience of such things told me that you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you're coming after it.

The Lonely Dead (2004)

First time you hear something, it sounds outlandish and broken and like it doesn't make sense. But once it's been in your head awhile it's as if the other thoughts in there wriggle out of the way to give it some room.

The Lonely Dead (2004)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michael Marshall Smith (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.