William M. Bass quotes:

All my life I'd been a believing Christian. But that instant in the ER--the instant Annette [his wife] died--I seemed to feel my religious faith die, too.As I thought more about it in the bleak days and weeks that followed, I decided the Bible had gotten it exactly backward. Maybe God hadn't created us in His image; maybe we'd created god in our image.

We're organisms; we're conceived, we're born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria."