Jefferson Bass > Quotes

“Flesh forgets. Bone remembers.”
― Jefferson Bass

“If you're going to play what-if --which, by the way, is a huge waste of time and energy, not to mention an act of supreme, center-of-the-universe narcissism-- you have to play it both ways. If you're going to imagine yourself as an accidental villain, you have to give yourself equal time as an unwitting hero. As somebody who prevented God-knows-what dire disaster simply by doing exactly the things you did.”
― Jefferson Bass

“You do have an eye for the tarnished lining.”
― Jefferson Bass, Flesh and Bone

“I might be turning into a guy who talks to himself, though." After a pause, I added, "Yep. I've been meaning to speak to you about that.”
― Jefferson Bass, Flesh and Bone

“The story of her death was written in bone.”
― Jefferson Bass, Carved in Bone

“Carpe librum, meant “Seize the book.”
― Jefferson Bass, The Bone Thief

“One recent experiment, for instance, demonstrated that people who died shortly after undergoing chemotherapy decomposed far more slowly than what I’d since begun to think of as “organic” or “all natural” bodies. Chemotherapy, in other words, bore more than a passing resemblance to antemortem embalming, which was not a particularly comforting notion.”
― Jefferson Bass, Flesh and Bone

“My God, is this a date?" Jeff had asked when I asked if I could bring her along.
"I don't know," I said. "She might still be happily lesbian.”
― Jefferson Bass, Carved in Bone

“... I watched in astonishment, Jess reached up and cupped Miss Georgia's breasts in her hands, giving them an appraising squeeze and admiring nod. A moment later, Miss Georgia returned the gesture...”
― Jefferson Bass, Flesh and Bone

“The morgue looked deserted, though in fact it was never unattended.”
― Jefferson Bass, Carved in Bone

“I remembered a line from Garrison Keillor, whose public radio show UT’s NPR affiliate had broadcast for years: “Life is complicated, and not for the timid.” Amen to that, brother, I thought. Amen to that.”
― Jefferson Bass, Carved in Bone

“But fat could be squeezed through almost any opening, given enough effort,”
― Jefferson Bass, Carved in Bone

“Did you say Mongoloid?” I nodded. “Man, that’s harsh. Why would somebody kill a retard?”
― Jefferson Bass, Carved in Bone

“Beauty’s only skin deep,” she murmured. “Stupidity goes all the way to the bone.”
― Jefferson Bass, Cut to the Bone

“Chemotherapy, in other words, bore more than a passing resemblance to antemortem embalming,”
― Jefferson Bass, Flesh and Bone

“Tell the guy I said, ‘Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’ Then tell him those were my dying words.”
― Jefferson Bass, Bones of Betrayal

“Each moment of your life is the sum total of all the prior moments.”
― Jefferson Bass, Bones of Betrayal

“know what Clement said about being pope?” I shook my head, as he’d hoped I would. “Clement said none of his predecessors knew how to be pope.” “What did he mean?” “He meant that none of the others knew how to throw such big parties. He was also called ‘Clement the Magnificent.’ When he was crowned as pope, he gave a feast for three thousand people. He served one thousand sheep, nine hundred goats, a hundred cows, a hundred calves, and sixty pigs.” “Goodness. That’s, what, ten, twenty pounds of meat for every person?” “Ah, but there is more. Much more. Ten thousand chickens. Fourteen hundred geese. Three hundred fish—” “Only three hundred?” He stretched his arms wide—“Pike, very big fish”—then transformed the gesture into a shrug. “But also, Catholics eat a lot of fish, so maybe it was not considered a delicacy.” He held up a finger. “Plus fifty thousand cheeses. And for dessert? Fifty thousand tarts.” “That’s not possible. Surely somebody exaggerated.” “Non, non, pas du tout. We have the book of accounts. It records what they bought, and how much it cost.” “How much did it cost?” “More than I will earn in my entire life. But it was a smart investment. It made him a favorite with the people who mattered—kings and queens and dukes. And, of course, with his cardinals and bishops, who sent him money they collected in their churches.” Turning away from the palace, he pointed to a building on the opposite side of the square. “Do you know this building?” I shook my head. “It’s just as important as the palace.” “What is it?” “The papal mint.” “Mint, as in money?” He nodded. “The popes coined their own money, and they built this mint here. They made gold florins in the mint, then stored them in the treasury in the palace.” “The popes had their own mint? That seems ironic, since Jesus chased the money changers out of the temple in Jerusalem.” “If you look for inconsistencies, you will find a million. The popes had armies. They had mistresses. They had children. They poisoned their rivals. They lived like kings and emperors; better than kings and emperors.” “And nobody objected?” “Oh, sure,” he said. “Some of the Franciscans—founded by Saint Francis of Assisi—they were very critical. They said monks and priests and popes should live in poverty, like Jesus.”
― Jefferson Bass, The Inquisitor's Key

“When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight…. They are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”
― Jefferson Bass, Carved in Bone

“donated skeletal collection; one more skull was just a final drop in the bucket. Megan and Todd Malone, a CT technician in the Radiology Department at UT Medical Center, ran skull 05-01 through the scanner, faceup, in a box that was packed with foam peanuts to hold it steady. Megan FedExed the scans to Quantico, where Diana and Phil Williams ran them through the experimental software. It was with high hopes, shortly after the scan, that I studied the computer screen showing the features ReFace had overlaid, with mathematical precision, atop the CT scan of Maybe-Leoma’s skull. Surely this image, I thought—the fruit of several years of collaboration by computer scientists, forensic artists, and anthropologists—would clearly settle the question of 05-01’s identity: Was she Leoma or was she Not-Leoma? Instead, the image merely amplified the question. The flesh-toned image on the screen—eyes closed, the features impassive—could have been a department-store mannequin, or a sphinx. There was nothing in the image, no matter how I rotated it in three dimensions, that said, “I am Leoma.” Nor was there anything that said, “I am not Leoma.” To borrow Winston Churchill’s famous description of Russia, the masklike face on the screen was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Between the scan, the software, and the tissue-depth data that the software merged with the”
― Jefferson Bass, Identity Crisis: The Murder, the Mystery, and the Missing DNA

“Men treat women like shit for the same reason they treat children or animals like shit: Because they can. It’s a power trip. ‘I’ll feel stronger and better if I prove that you’re weaker,’ right?”
― Jefferson Bass, Cut to the Bone

“roughly the same number”
― Jefferson Bass, Flesh and Bone

“The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the Nazis as they implemented the madness of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But tens of millions more had died, too—another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half years of fighting—a dreadful toll, to be sure—American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war’s total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and sixteen million civilians as Japan’s armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and bloody eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, massacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And”
― Jefferson Bass, Bones of Betrayal

“Okay, I’ve noticed some of you carefully studying the pelvises of your classmates. So I’m sure you’ll have no trouble identifying the differences between the male and female.”
― Jefferson Bass, Carved in Bone

“The Wizard of Oz where the coroner in Munchkinland pronounces the witch crushed by Dorothy’s house to be “not only merely dead,” but “really most sincerely dead.”
― Jefferson Bass, Bones of Betrayal

“When they hear the term “anthropology,” they think of Margaret Mead and her sexually liberated Samoans, or Jane Goodall and her colony of chimps, not physical anthropologists and their calipers and bones.”
― Jefferson Bass, Carved in Bone

“Each moment of your life is the sum total of all the prior moments. There’s not a single thing that happens to you that doesn’t leave its mark; doesn’t redirect your course somehow; doesn’t make you more fully who you are. It took every single step—even the steps you took as life dragged you by the hair of your head—to put you exactly where you are.”
― Jefferson Bass, Bones of Betrayal