Memorial Service Sayings

#1. Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew (at Bruce Chatwin's memorial service) behind him. "I suppose we'll be here for you next week, Salman," he said.

Salman Rushdie

#2. Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness."
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)

Jonathan Franzen

#3. Memorial Service: Farewell party for someone who already left.

Robert Byrne

#4. Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?

Anne Tyler

#5. The funeral was not a funeral. Her family called it a memorial service, because they hadn't found Diana's body yet, but everyone in New Iberia called the hour at St. Peter's a funeral, either out of respect or ignorance. The boundary was hazy.

Lauren Kate

#6. Liar. You've loved me since I held your hand at your mother's memorial service when you were five years old.

Kristen Ashley

#7. I don't want to spend a fortune on my cremation urn, but I really do want to look nice at my memorial service.

Lynn Flewelling

#8. I have asked to have no funeral, and no memorial service. I hate other people's and would certainly not appreciate my own.

Charles Saatchi

#9. A president can't go to every memorial service.

Nancy Gibbs

#10. Chris Hedges said that Michael Jackson's memorial service was a variety show with a coffin, that MJ transformed himself through surgery and perhaps female hormones from a brown-skinned African American male to a chalk-faced androgynous ghoul with no clear sexual identity.

Chris Hedges

#11. Tim Russert is dead. But the room was alive. You can't work it too hard at a memorial service, obviously. It's the kind of thing people notice.

Mark Leibovich

#12. There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the house, writes the author in all seriousness describing a memorial service for a medical school's cadavers.

Mary Roach

#13. Happy Memorial Day! Thank you to all our service men and women past and present. You are not forgotten!

Courteney Cox

#14. I asked the question, 'Will I ever perform again?'

Brian Harvey

#15. Is it or is it not ethical to create an embryo, and to create a person for the purpose of getting an organ to give to someone else? Your knee-jerk reaction is 'absolutely not;' but you need the ethical analysis of that to show why and how that is something that you need to stay away from.

Anthony Fauci

#16. While there are towns and cities still planning Memorial Day parades, many have not held a parade in decades. Some think the day is for honoring anyone who has died, not just those fallen in service to our country.

Allen West

#17. The poets are wrong of course [ ... ] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

William Faulkner

#18. There is a big difference between having your heart broken and being the one responsible for a broken heart. I was twelve years old and had already experienced both.

Eveli Acosta

#19. Confused and unable to help, my hair went into panic mode.

Bill Bryson

#20. Our debt to the heroic men and valiant women in the service of our country can never be repaid. They have earned our undying gratitude. America will never forget their sacrifices.

Harry S. Truman

#21. If I'm on a boat I will wave to every breathing thing I pass. If I'm not on a boat I try to avoid every breathing thing I pass.

Caroline Manzo

#22. I'm hers. To confide in. To vent to. To celebrate with. To grow with. To show her strengths. To bear her vulnerabilities. To laugh with. To cry with. To love. And to be loved by. I'm hers.

Kim Holden

#23. Those ancients who in poetry presented
the golden age, who sang its happy state,
perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place.
Here, mankind's root was innocent; and here
were every fruit and never-ending spring;
these streams
the nectar of which poets sing.

Dante Alighieri

#24. Obstinate, headstrong girl!

Jane Austen

#25. As Han once told me, "Stealth and subtlety work well, but for making lasting impressions, a blaster does just fine.

Michael A. Stackpole

#26. It always takes awhile to find out who the characters are.

Rene Auberjonois