How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet. (1.2)
We get a heavy, blood-soaked taste of death right at the beginning of The Graveyard Book.
Quote #2
But there was a difference between the folk in the graveyard and this: a raw, flickering, startling shape the grey color of television static, all panic and naked emotion which flooded the Owenses as if it was their own. (1.43)
This passage is from Mrs. Owens’s point of view. She’s studying Bod’s very recently dead mother. Apparently, there are stages of being dead, and it’s something one has to get used to, just like life.
Quote #3
“The Saturday after they drowned and toasted me, a carpet was delivered to Mr. Porringer […]. […] it carried the plague in its pattern, and by Monday five of them were coughing blood, and their skins were gone as black as mine when they hauled me from the fire.” (4.82)
Liza describes some really horrible deaths here. Liza dies by fire, after first getting drowned. But the people who burn her to death, and the people who watch her burn, later suffer, perhaps even more horribly. Unlike Liza, they don’t get a final resting place anywhere near the nice graveyard either. Instead, they were tossed into plague pits – enormous pits where the people who die from the plague were thrown.