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The saying "That which does not kill me can only make me stronger" is a particularly annoying phrase to tell someone who's just recently died.

It's the kind of thing that isn't generally comfortable for either party involved. The speaker because they just then realise the fact that the statement may be slightly inapplicable in the present case. For the dead person because they're dead, which probably isn't an entirely comfortable state at any rate (though you may get used to it after some time), and because the saying has a particularly nasty effect of inducing a contemplative state in the dead person. What does that which kills me make me? Besides dead, of course. What was the point of it all? (The heavy metaphysical probes are the ones that really begin to annoy you after a while, being dead. It's like being a first year philosophy student for an eternity, only with hindsight, and with slightly more limited capacity to annoy people with the vocalised philosophical concerns, being largely transparent, and definitely ex-corpus.)
And, not that he was told that phrase very often, he always tended to start thinking about where he'd left his keys, and whether or not his last words may have been "What the hell have you done to my towel cupboard" to his dog, followed by a bit of animated gurgling and the soppy sounds of extremely wet and ragged towels. He thought a lot about the series of lasts he'd had. From last meal to last book he'd read to his last action to a whole other slew of lasts. It wasn't a terribly impressive catalogue of lasts: an entire bag of crisps, he got halfway through Cryptinomicon, and his last action, of course, was getting hit by a surprisingly deadly blunt instrument from behind.

And now, standing across from the reporter, who was busy looking at her shoes and thinking of some sort of saying about being dead and it having some sort of good ending, he was thinking those thoughts and the slightly less helpful one about the way her hair fell across her face when she looked down at her shoes in embarrasment. Temptations of the flesh apparently don't subside when you've no longer got any flesh yourself.

She'd been hired to do a piece, initially, on average people's gardens to try and highlight what average people had thought to do with their own gardens, only upon arriving, amidst the exploded mirror which no one had gotten around to cleaning up and the dead host, she decided to change tack and approach the interview as an insight into how dead people tended to their gardens.
Seeing as how the garden was tarmac'd over, she was just thinking of what other angle she could explore and, while thinking, after refusing the offer of tea, she passed the comment from Nietzsche that he presumably never tried to use on a dead person before.
She had never seen a dead person blanche before (had never really seen a dead person as animated as this one was, for that matter), but she believe he got slightly paler at her comment. Or perhaps he was blushing. It was difficult to tell with him being almost completely transparent.

disclaimer:
This is yet another excerpt from the extremely popular novel Sleep(s) on Chickens, by William Murphy.
It is possibly one of William's (a former sanemagazine staffer) more morose works, as it happens that quite a few of the main characters are deceased in some fashion or another.
We'll be printing more and more excerpts from this flash whiz bang rollercoaster ride of a novel that mentions chickens in the title.