Caitlin Doughty Quotes

#1. A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard.

Caitlin Doughty

#2. Death should be KNOWN. Known as a difficult mental, physical and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.

Caitlin Doughty

#3. Because we've never encountered a decomposing body, we can only assume they are out to get us. It is no wonder there is a cultural fascination with zombies.

Caitlin Doughty

#4. Mother Nature, as Tennyson said, is "red in tooth and claw," demolishing every beautiful thing she has ever created.

Caitlin Doughty

#5. Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families.

Caitlin Doughty

#6. Treat your online affairs as part of your affairs that need to be in order - your bank, your Internet bill - you need to have people who know what you want.

Caitlin Doughty

#7. I think about death most of the day, every day. We can't escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary.

Caitlin Doughty

#8. Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.

Caitlin Doughty

#9. If we ignore our death, we end up just going around completely oblivious to why we do the things we do!

Caitlin Doughty

#10. The Cremulator" sounds like a cartoon villain or the name of a monster truck but is in fact the name of what is essentially a bone blender, roughly the size of a kitchen crockpot. I

Caitlin Doughty

#11. I want a natural burial. Just straight into the ground in a shroud.

Caitlin Doughty

#12. All the body wants to do biologically is decompose. Once you die, it's, 'Let me out here! I'm ready to shoot my atoms back into the universe!'

Caitlin Doughty

#13. Death in its natural state can be very beautiful. When you think about a body that's died of natural causes - family taking care of it - all of that is very beautiful.

Caitlin Doughty

#14. Accepting your own mortality is like eating your vegetables: You may not want to do it, but it's good for you.

Caitlin Doughty

#15. One of the things that was most shocking to me about starting to work in the funeral industry is just how industrial the environment is.

Caitlin Doughty

#16. I work with a group called Compassion & Choices in California. It's attempting to get death with dignity legalised in California, the idea being that so goes California, so goes the rest of the U.S., at least.

Caitlin Doughty

#17. The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived.

Caitlin Doughty

#18. Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves. This

Caitlin Doughty

#19. Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Caitlin Doughty

#20. ...it would be a lie to describe the experience as anything less than exhilarating, the repulsive going hand in hand with the wondrous.

Caitlin Doughty

#21. Though you may never have attended a funeral, two of the world's humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we're at fourteen. The dead space this process out nicely so that the living hardly even notice they're undergoing the transformation. Unless

Caitlin Doughty

#22. The home funeral - caring for the dead ourselves - changes our relationship to grieving. If you have been married to someone for 50 years, why would you let someone take them away the moment they die?

Caitlin Doughty

#23. For thousands of years, we did have death surrounding us, and we did have people die in the home. You would take care of your own end. You would do ritual processes, and you would be involved in it, and that's been taken away in the Western world.

Caitlin Doughty

#24. As Kafka said, "The meaning of life is that it ends.

Caitlin Doughty

#25. I was fascinated by mortality. Most people are, even if they don't admit it.

Caitlin Doughty

#26. Going around not fully believing that you're going to die is really problematic because it affects how you think about the future of the planet, about the future of your own life, about the decisions you're making.

Caitlin Doughty

#27. Looking mortality straight in the eyeis n easy feat. To avoid the exercise, we choose to stay blindfolded, in the dark as to the realities of death and dying. But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror.

Caitlin Doughty

#28. In America, burial means an embalmed body in a heavy-duty casket with a vault built over it, so that the ground doesn't settle. That body is encased in many layers of denial.

Caitlin Doughty

#29. Though you may have never attended a funeral, two of the world's humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we're at fourteen. If this is too abstract, consider this number: 2.5 million. The 2.5 million people who die in the United States every year.

Caitlin Doughty

#30. Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late 19th century, dying at a hospital was reserved for people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family.

Caitlin Doughty

#31. Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, "The meaning of life is that it ends." Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.

Caitlin Doughty

#32. The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.

Caitlin Doughty

#33. I've worked very hard to become comfortable with how death works and why it happens. I now know that death isn't out to get me.

Caitlin Doughty

#34. The biggest problem is the funerals that don't exist. People call the funeral home, they pick up the body, they mail the ashes to you, no grief, no happiness, no remembrance, no nothing. That happens more often than it doesn't in the United States.

Caitlin Doughty

#35. There is not much to enjoy in a layer of inorganic human bone dusted behind one's ear or gathered underneath a fingernail,

Caitlin Doughty

#36. One of the many lessons to emerge from Hurricane Katrina is that Americans are not accustomed to seeing unattended bodies on the streets of a major city." Understatement of the century, Doctor.

Caitlin Doughty

#37. It is no surprise that the people trying so frantically to extend our lifespans are almost entirely rich, white men. Men who have lived lives of systematic privilege, and believe that privilege should extend indefinitely.

Caitlin Doughty

#38. Death had brought them all here for a kind of United Nations summit, a roundtable discussion on nonexistence.

Caitlin Doughty

#39. They say you can put lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig. The same holds true for a dead body. Put lipstick on a corpse and you've played dress-up with a corpse.

Caitlin Doughty

#40. The definition of 'morbid' is an unhealthy preoccupation with death. Unfortunately, there's no word to mean the perfectly healthy preoccupation with death, which is what I have.

Caitlin Doughty

#41. This isn't for other people," he explained. "This is for me. I'm terrified at the thought of my body decaying. I don't want to die. I want to live forever.

Caitlin Doughty

#42. Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.

Caitlin Doughty

#43. Ever since childhood, when I found out that the ultimate fate for all humans was death, sheer terror and morbid curiosity had been fighting for supremacy in my mind.

Caitlin Doughty

#44. In many ways, women are death's natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women "give birth astride of a grave." Mother Nature is indeed a real mother, creating and destroying in a constant loop.

Caitlin Doughty

#45. The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation. There is no limit to where our engagement with death can take us.

Caitlin Doughty

#46. If people really knew what they were getting into with their third chemotherapy treatment, or getting a pacemaker when they're 92, if they really knew what that was going to mean, they might say no, and we should give them that information.

Caitlin Doughty

#47. Twenty-one years is time enough to be a fuck-up, sure, but not time enough to be a lost cause.

Caitlin Doughty

#48. The girl kept up at night by fear, crouched under the covers, believing if death couldn't see her, then he couldn't take her.

Caitlin Doughty

#49. A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.

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#50. I am a mortician who tells you that you don't necessarily need a mortician.

Caitlin Doughty

#51. Good afternoon, here I am in your multimillion-dollar home covered in people dust and smelling vaguely of rot. Please pay me a large sum of money to mold the impressionable mind of your teenager.

Caitlin Doughty

#52. Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create. Philosophers have proclaimed this for thousands of years just as vehemently as we insist upon ignoring it generation after generation.

Caitlin Doughty

#53. Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending.

Caitlin Doughty

#54. Not only is natural burial by far the most ecologically sound way to perish, it doubles down on the fear of fragmentation and loss of control. Making the choice to be naturally buried says, 'Not only am I aware that I'm a helpless, fragmented mass of organic matter, I celebrate it. Vive la decay!'

Caitlin Doughty

#55. pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore, / Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost or gone before.

Caitlin Doughty