What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator

The first lie of an addict is diminishment. Diminishing what happened, how much you drank, how awful your behavior was. You try to diminish everything, but you're not fooling anyone, only making yourself small.

People can handle the truth, but not uncertainty. The things they imagine are almost always more painful than the facts.

When you leave here each day, surround yourself with things of beauty. Enjoy nature and art and food and music and love. Just do it, and don’t skip a day.

When we are young, we are motivated by desire, and as we get older, by fear. Maybe as life goes on and your heart gets broken a few times, it's easier to be attached to things rather than people.

She needed to understand what drove these people to commit such heinous acts. She needed to believe we were different from them.

Women are less invested in being right than men are,” he said, “so they’re more inclined to keep an open mind, to reserve judgment. Or to put it more crudely, they don’t get involved in dick-waving contests with the police.” He had a point. It wasn’t the first time he declaimed female superiority. Charles Hirsch loved women, but more than that, he appreciated them. He preferred the way they thought and spoke over the more ego-driven style of men.

Be a part of what you do. Do your work with pride.

So around 1960 or so, Fidel Castro comes to town. He’s gonna do a speech at the United Nations. Goes to a fancy hotel downtown and they ask him for cash money up front. Like he’s some kind of no-count nobody instead of the president of Cuba.

She needed to believe we were different from them.

It was wonderful to have fun, then wake up the next morning and realize I hadn’t done anything stupid.

I was told to 'act as if.' Act as if you are sober, confident, unafraid. Act until it's no longer an act.

If you think of a thing, do it. The distance of the body from the building, distance of the brain from the head, approximate height of the building—maybe they could tell us something.