Best Quotes from Dead Men Do Tell Tales by William R. Maples with Page Numbers

Truth is discoverable. Truth wants to be discovered.

I have often wondered whether I have a character flaw, to be so drawn to deathly things.

I wanted to see life as it really was, not through the smudged window-pane of a newspaper.

My father’s deathbed faith in me has heartened me all my life.

Every person, from the most depraved serial killer to the most seraphic innocent, was likely loved by someone when each was alive.

What we see on the table will have to be related to the families of victims and to the relatives of killers.

Lies and laziness repel me more than the most putrefied corpse.

The truth is a valuable and rare commodity.

My esteem for the human race waned considerably.

I learned to spot the people who specialize in falling down in front of vehicles.

"People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane."

"When you have seen bodies burned to cinders in fires, or pummeled to jelly under a truckload of bricks, or reduced to empty skins whose bones have been squeezed from them by the terrific force of plane crashes, then the bumps and bogies of academic life hold few terrors for you."

"It could be worse," you tell yourself; and when worse is the thing you saw lying dead in a highway culvert scarcely twelve hours earlier, you know you are telling the truth.

"My early experiences riding shotgun in the funeral parlor’s ambulance in Texas had shown me a side of life no book could teach."

"I shall never forget those lucid, decisive moments in which he practically made that old skull speak."

"The miserable pay and financial woes; the long nights of study and the battles against sleep; the frightful hurdles of examinations; all these torments are well known in Academe, and have been known to drive some people mad, even to suicide."

"But the skeletal remains that had moldered for two years in the wild could still speak to me."

"Finally, along the inner surface of that brain case you could see pitting, where an infection had eroded the bone during life."

"The sutures and shape established the age and sex of the owner; the trauma marks established the shape and type of the weapon."

"This victory was owed to good luck, hard work and the mercy of the alligators who gnawed the victim’s head away from her body."

Here lie bones burned and boiled, drowned and desiccated; bones that once lay buried, long forgotten, are now summoned back suddenly into the light of day.

But this finality is an illusion. Just as in the book of Ezekiel, the dry bones knit themselves back together, are covered anew with flesh, draw breath and at last stand forth as a living host of human beings.

The truth is germinating in them, sprouting up vividly.

We have few living visitors, and those who are admitted must show they have good reason to enter. But the dead are welcomed, and we show them every courtesy.

There is no horrible, hidden mystery involved in decomposition. Basically there are two well-mapped processes involved: autolysis and putrefaction.

Dreadful as all these processes may seem, they are only the resolution of certain carbon-based compounds into certain other carbon-based compounds.

Corpses are not just remnants of death; they are valuable pieces of evidence and stories waiting to be uncovered.

Bones can riddle us devilishly.

It takes experience and willpower to overcome the impulse to shrink away and flee.

We owe them that.

"No burial is forever. Burial is only long-term storage."

"Rest in Peace," we carve on our tombstones, heavy slabs of marble that are almost certainly destined to be scattered like chaff, long before the Last Judgment."

"There is no antidote against the Opium of time... Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks…"

"When we consider that scarcely an active cemetery on the planet is more than a few hundred years old, we realize how short our undisturbed subterranean sleep can be."

"A buried body can be devilishly difficult to find... but if no one talks, and the burial remains secret, and the grave ages a bit, then finding a buried body is in truth the rarest of accidents."

"I had some difficulty dredging up any pity for the deceased in this case. The world lost little when he was murdered."

"Stones turn to dust, and we all return to earth."

"The entry wound's trajectory matched the girl’s story with extraordinary exactitude. She was telling the truth."

"The general rule of thumb for the rate of decomposition is: one week in the open air equals two weeks in water, equals eight weeks underground."

"I confess I had some difficulty dredging up any pity for the deceased in this case. The world lost little when he was murdered."

To profane a dead body by cutting it to pieces has always seemed, at least to our Western eyes, an act of bestial brutality.

Alas, it must be admitted from the outset that dismemberment is an extremely effective means of concealing a victim’s identity.

The pieces remain, the culprit goes uncaptured and unpunished.

More and more today, dismemberment cases are being treated with the attention they deserve.

The real victory in these dismemberment cases is often scientific and intellectual, rather than moral.

It is amazing how burly policemen can dwindle and disappear when there is dirty work like this to be done!

The victim and I, we are trying to defend ourselves. We throw our forearms up, we grapple with our fingers, we turn our heads aside, clinging to life.

Bones yet will have their say.

This case made up for many of the puzzling dismemberments which ended, after so much work on my part, in perplexity and riddles.

Hew at them though you may, bones yet will have their say.

But play the man, stand up and end you, when the sickness is your soul.

Suicide has the power to unsettle us all, to make even the dullest brain philosophize for a few minutes about the meaning of life.

From seeing the ax, to grasping the ax, to wielding the ax is a process that can occupy less than a minute.

In most cases I have dealt with, suicide has proved to be a hasty, profligate, wasteful and ill-considered solution to a doubtful problem.

We ought to take a step backward, suspend judgment, and look with mercy upon those for whom death was a mercy.

Gallows humor and graveyard whistling are normal human reactions in the face of death.

Some suicide victims are willing to pass through hellish torments in order to attain the surcease from sorrow they crave.

Loneliness, old age, incurable and painful illnesses, these are sometimes sufficient reasons for suicide.

Many people, of course, kill themselves without meaning to.

Sometimes we find the receipt from the gun store, where the weapon was bought a few days or hours earlier.

...the darker the crime, the brighter shines the solution.

By challenging us to unravel seemingly impossible knots of malevolence, the killers have ultimately helped us in the advancement of science and the spread of knowledge.

It is a singular fact that some of the most dazzling pieces of detective work in our profession have come about as a direct result of some extraordinarily depraved murder.

Our discipline is so new fledged that even in the 1930s the recently founded FBI had to take its cases across the street to the Smithsonian Institution for analysis.

One comes away from the AAFS convention with renewed energy to try something new, do something differently.

These annual meetings are a splendid opportunity for us to trade ideas, to scrape away the rust of academic isolation.

The skeleton of one of the curators of the museum, who had bequeathed his bones to the collection, where they had remained for many years.

The extraordinary Clyde Snow can be relied upon to tell hair-raising stories, in his Southwestern drawl, of the latest bodies he’s examined in war zones.

It is interesting to speculate what effect the Ruxton case may have had upon the young film director, Alfred Hitchcock, who was just then coming into his own in Great Britain.

That is true camaraderie!

Our skeletons are constantly in flux, constantly reshaping themselves.

We keep no secrets from our bones.

All we have been, or nearly, is inscribed and enclosed in our skeletons.

Medical museums are not attics in which to store things merely for curiosity’s sake.

This skeleton, perhaps more than any other I have ever beheld, talks to you in very simple, powerful, human terms.

Bone never lisps, stutters or falls dumb. It proclaims its truths the more loudly, the more it is taxed and twisted by unnatural nature and misfortune.

The astonishing hardness and durability of human bone can deceive the untaught into thinking that bone is something rocklike and changeless.

Joseph Merrick, whose story has reached a modern audience, made an indelible impression on me.

With each passing year, my movements are slightly more circumscribed.

I could see the two halves of Joseph Merrick, soul and body: the delicate, intelligent person caged within.

Hell is not a place, some theologians declare, but a state of being.

I have seen where it falls to earth, extinguishing life and disfiguring limb.

The impulse to evil is something deep within an individual from his very earliest years, if not from birth.

At the center of the labyrinth of certain human personalities there lurks a Minotaur that feeds on human flesh.

The more we know about these affairs, the more alert we will be to their telltale signs.

I hope sincerely that a day will come when the brutal parent or adult will stay his or her hand.

It costs me an effort, in my professional capacity, to put aside the outrage any human being must experience when brought into contact with these depravities.

Some murders are never solved and that this little girl was among those innocents whose deaths go unavenged.

We create a kind of sterile dead zone around a murderer and his deeds, a sort of 'blasted heath' like that in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

If evil is to be found in the brain, then it is probably there from the very earliest years of life, and involves something very basic in the individual’s personality.

Death is not the end of all, and the pale ghost escapes the raked-over funeral pyre.

The ultimate bonfire of the vanities, in which all that we wore in life is brightly, briskly swept away like dross.

Flame does interesting things to bones, and part of my job is to examine human skeletal remains after they have been burned.

Flames can create, and urns can hold, some very lively stories.

If you reflect a little you will see what I mean. Most of us carry around a surprising load of extraneous, artificial baggage inside our bodies.

These tiny clips can be cross-checked against surgical records at the hospital where the surgery was performed.

I tell you it can be done. I have done it.

The greatest problem we have in these cases probably isn’t the condition of the cremains. It’s that someone is trying to save money and do an investigation on the cheap.

It takes a very solid knowledge of bone anatomy and variation and often a very vivid reconstructive imagination to identify these minuscule fragments of bone and metal.

All that remains today is a cool, silent urn in a distant columbarium.

You will say that reality does not have the slightest obligation to be interesting. I reply that even if reality can escape the necessity of being interesting, hypotheses never can.

Everything about this case seemed to defy a simple solution.

At times we seemed to be gazing through a kaleidoscope instead of a magnifying glass.

True, the medical examiner’s investigator had collected all the bones in a single bag, but before this happened Alachua County Sheriffs Department investigators had taken good, clear photographs of the crime scene.

Bones may riddle us, but they never lie.

I have decided to rope myself down before I use the shotgun in case I might do the same and fall from our platform.

When life is extinguished, and the flesh falls away, and the hard frame of the skeleton lies exposed on the laboratory table—that is my hour.

I believe Page Jennings was dead days before the fire in the cabin on January 18.

In those days I was still occupying rooms at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The most troublesome case I had ever encountered was finally solved.

O stranger, go tell the Spartans That here we lie, obedient to their orders.

It is the vanished soldiers of Vietnam who tug at our hearts and rob many of us of our reason today.

Though we believe the Vietnamese authorities are acting in good faith, it sometimes happens that the remains of one person may be scattered throughout several boxes.

The task of identifying unaccounted-for remains at CILHI is immense and never ending.

The search for unaccounted-for servicemen does not stop at CILHI’s laboratory doors.

In the rain forests of New Guinea they can be found investigating the hundreds of plane crashes left over from World War II.

Some want to get the whole thing behind them, and some will never sleep until they have vengeance.

But I think if more Americans were aware of the immense concern and deep respect that is accorded to every single fragment of bone, no matter how tiny, that has been recovered in the search for these unaccounted-for men and women, then perhaps some of these widespread doubts and anxieties might be allayed.

The very confidential nature of the military identification process itself inhibits free discussion.

I could have identified him!” Tadao’s spirit was unconquerable.

Francisco Pizarro died as he lived, by the sword.

Indomitable in adversity, ruthless in victory, Pizarro and his followers laid waste utterly to the Inca civilization.

There is a powerful magic in the past.

If we are not careful, we fall into dreams of bygone days and the light of sunsets long extinguished.

As Margaret Thatcher admonished George Bush in the emergency days after Iraq invaded Kuwait: 'Now, George, this is no time to go wobbly!'

I cannot afford to go wobbly.

The extraordinary trauma inflicted on the neck agreed very closely with accounts of Pizarro’s murder.

His last sight on earth must have been terrible: flashing steel points, rising and falling and piercing his body.

Fame is fleeting—even in death.

This climaxed in 1532 with his famous march to Cajamarca, deep in the Peruvian interior.

The dead have a right to privacy, and there must be a good, compelling reason for us to break in upon the slumber of the grave.

Human remains are not the property of cemeteries. They don’t belong to the nation... They belong to the relatives who survive them.

No corpse on earth has the power to overawe me. Our defunct bodies are all equal before science.

In the case of President Taylor, there was the charge—albeit unproven—of murder, the foulest crime man can commit.

With or without me, Zachary Taylor’s tomb was going to be opened that Monday morning and the only way the federal government could prevent this was by armed force!

Murder is another thing entirely, and murder was what we aimed to prove or disprove.

The amounts of arsenic found in all samples were consistent throughout. They showed that President Taylor had in his remains only the levels of arsenic consistent with any person who lived in the nineteenth century.

Zachary Taylor died of natural causes. Indeed, he may have been unwittingly killed by his doctors.

Zachary Taylor can take his proper place in history, as a military commander who fought hard for his country and as a President who did not shrink from his duty.

This sincere piece of gallantry is among his smaller monuments. It came from Zachary Taylor’s own heart.

"The world will never know what we did with them..."

"But in accordance with our new democratic principles."

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

"Even his bad teeth had outlasted the outlaw state that had slain him..."

"Truth often lies buried deep in the rubbish heap of a braggart’s lies."

"I believe Nicholas must have had a horror of dentists..."

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever...."

"The three young women’s skeletons, as well as that of the oldest woman, have features in common that are often seen in families..."

"Is it conceivable that some kindhearted Bolshevik spirited them away? Is it thinkable that...the missing royal children lived?"

"The mystery of the Romanovs is solved as nearly as it is likely to be."

The lamp of science, properly grasped and directed, can shine its rays into the very heart of darkness.

It cannot raise the dead, but it can make them speak, accuse and identify the agent of death.

With each solved case, with every confession, we extend our knowledge of the criminal mind and its methods.

There are some things you can’t run from anymore.

The power to bear witness to the truth beyond death; the power to avenge the innocent; the power to terrify the guilty.

Let idle talk be silenced. Let laughter be banished.

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions.

These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

It is up to me, the forensic anthropologist, to catch their mute cries and whispers, and to interpret them for the living.

Here at least is solid, measurable progress. Here I can claim to have made a difference.