"Over the long haul, The Big One hovers right around ... well, dead nuts on one hundred percent. If this were on the charts, they'd call it the death expectancy and no one would by futures of any kind." Chap. 1, The Undertaking, pp. 4-5

"And he loved to quote Gladstone, the great Victorian Liberal who sounds like a New Age Republication when he wrote that he could measure with mathematical precision a people's respect for the laws of the land by the way they cared for their dead." Chap. 2, Gladstone, p. 18

"Elders grew aged and sickly not upstairs in their own beds, but in a series of institutional venues: rest homes, nursing homes, hospital wards, sanitoria. Which is where they died: the chance, in 1960, of dying in your own bed: less than one in ten. ... This is how my business came to be." Chap. 3, Crapper, p. 36

"As a funeral...