Having once... explored the troubled minds of patients at McLean, Danvers, Arkham, I advise you against questioning the living for explanation. Look to the dead. Their knowledge is no longer compromised by horror or shame. They are a library, a morbid encyclopedia of the acts that brought us here, to our modern world, and to humanity's place in it. A half-way house on the evolutionary scale, between Neanderthals and something quite different, quite terrible. Something changed. Not like you are changing, probably not. But try a little background reading with the dead: they will not lie to you, unless they see an escape from torment or enslavement in it, I suppose.
—Hayden Montag, The Secret World
"Wait!" I called out, hearing him preparing to exit. "At least take this corpse out of here!" And let me open your throat and gulp down your blood, I thought to myself.
He spoke his next words as if he were smiling, or so it sounded: "No, I'll leave him with you. Maybe he can answer some of your questions."
—Vampire: The Masquerade - Clanbook: Cappadocian
He... he doesn't just talk, Harry, he doesn't ask. Doesn't even try. He just reaches in and takes, steals. You can't hide anything from him. He finds his answers in your blood, your guts, in the marrow of your very bones. The dead can't feel pain, Harry, or they shouldn't. But that's part of his talent, too. When Boris Dragosani works, he makes us feel it. I felt his knives, I felt his knives, his hands, his tearing nails. I knew everything he did, and all of it was hell! After one minute I would have told him everything, but that's not his way, it's not his art. How could he be sure I told the truth? But his way he knows it's the truth! It's written in skin and muscle, in ligaments and tendons and corpuscles. He can read it in brain fluid, in the mucus of the eye and ear, in the texture of the dead tissue itself!
—Sir Keenan Gormley, Necroscope
Ghant: All I need is a word, Scrape. Spell it out for me and all the pain will stop.
Scrape: Please, I don't know! I don't even remember anymore! Honest to fucking god!
Ghant: Alright, you obstinate little shit. Down we go again. Fifth Circle this time. See you in half an hour - or a thousand years from your point of view.
Scrape: [vanishing from sight] No! Christ, no!
Joshua: Playing with the bone abacus, Ghant? It'll make you go blind, you know..
Ghant: Well, I've tried every bastard thing else. It's not easy to torture a sodding ghost.
—Hellblazer: Red Sepulchre
Okay, so dead men tell no tales, right? Wrong. See, with ADAM involved, every stiff's got a story — and Lamb knows how to read it.
—Stanley Poole, Bioshock 2
Godot: Upon meeting a beautiful lady, always ask for her name and profession. That's one of my rules.
Dahlia: Dahlia Hawthorne. And my current profession? Permanently retired.
Godot: So you're not bothering to hide your identity anymore, huh?
Dahlia: Why should I? After all, I'm dead. There's really nothing you can do to punish me!
Dahlia: Dahlia Hawthorne. And my current profession? Permanently retired.
Godot: So you're not bothering to hide your identity anymore, huh?
Dahlia: Why should I? After all, I'm dead. There's really nothing you can do to punish me!
