Top 82 Obituary Quotes
#2. My school was so tough the school newspaper had an obituary section.
Norm Crosby
#3. I don't think most people know what's going to be in their obituary, but I do.
Robert Mankoff
#4. When the 'Guardian' is commissioning writers to write obituary pieces about you and your career ... it doesn't get much nastier than that. And you've just got to go, 'It doesn't actually matter.'
James Corden
#5. Everybody is a potential murderer. I've never killed anyone, but I frequently get satisfaction reading the obituary notices.
Clarence Darrow
#6. If I were to win the Nobel Prize in Literature - which I think it's fairly safe to say is not going to happen - I would still expect the headline on my obituary to read: 'Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr., is dead at 78.'
Christopher Buckley
#7. In my mind my obituary is done.It is done and it is right. It tells the truth and as awful as it can be, the truth is what matters. It is what I should be remembered by, if I'm remembered at all. Remember the truth. that is all that matters
James Frey
#8. There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.
Brendan Behan
#9. An obituary should be an exercise in contemporary history, not a funeral oration.
Peter Utley
#10. Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.
(Last words, according to Dickens's obituary in The Times.)
Charles Dickens
#11. What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died.
William Faulkner
#12. All publicity is good, except an obituary notice.
Brendan Behan
#13. The obituary writers drew their incomplete sketches, touring through his life like travelers to England who do not ever see swans, sheep, bicycles, and blue eyes.
Mark Helprin
#14. When my obituary notice at last appears in The Times, and they say: 'What, I thought he died years ago,' my ghost will gently chuckle.
W. Somerset Maugham
#15. Grandma Mazur reads the obituary columns like they're part of the paper's entertainment section. Other communities have country clubs and fraternal orders. The Burg has funeral parlors. If people stopped dying, the social life of the Burg would come to a grinding halt.
Janet Evanovich
#16. You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
Barbara Kruger
#17. His true monument lies not on the shelves of libraries, but in the thoughts of men, and in the history of more than one science.
{Gibbs's obituary for scientist Rudolf Clausius}
Josiah Willard Gibbs
#18. The savage repression of blacks, which can be estimated by reading the obituary columns of the nation's dailies, Fred Hampton, etc., has not failed to register on the black inmates.
George Jackson
#19. God was long gone before Nietzsche made his death certificate into a slogan, but no one
has yet written the obituary of the Devil.
Thomas Ligotti
#20. A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.
George Jean Nathan
#21. When a writer dies you get a higher standard of obituary.
Arthur Smith
#22. I contemplated suicide. My main concern was that I would not make the New York Times obituary page.
Art Buchwald
#23. Hang onto your sense of humor. I picture my obituary : The sexiest man alive is now dead.
Mark Harmon
#24. And Hopkins, seeing that Tisdall was unaware of Grant's identity, rushed in with glad maliciousness. "That is Scotland Yard," he said. "Inspector Grant. Never had an unsolved crime to his name." "I hope you write my obituary," Grant said. "I hope I do!" the journalist said, with fervor.
Josephine Tey
#25. Do not give alms promiscuously. Select the unworthy poor and make them happy. To give to the deserving is a duty, but to help the improvident, drinking class is clear generosity, so that the donor has a right to be warmed by a selfish pride and count on a most flattering obituary.
George Ade
#26. The seed for my novel 'Half Brother' was planted in my mind over twenty years ago, but didn't germinate until late 2007 when I came across the obituary for Washoe, an extraordinary chimpanzee who had learned over 250 words of American Sign Language.
Kenneth Oppel
#27. I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.
Clarence Darrow
#28. Live in such a way no one who reads your obituary will be surprised you're a Christian.
Darrell Case
#30. I have to erase my Google search histories, because they always lead to an obituary.
Carrie Brownstein
#31. I'm a survivor, I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.
Tobias Wolff
#32. One of the things I can do is to try to put myself in different kinds of movies and that kind of subtly changes my work. By the time my obituary is written, I want there to be a great western and a great comedy.
Ethan Hawke
#33. I don't wonder about anything. I'm too old to wonder. I think the most important thing is to wake-up with a pulse. I look in the obituary columns. If I'm not in it, I get out of bed.
Hector Elizondo
#34. An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp
#35. Some of the plants have obituary names: Iris, Basil, Rue, Rosemary, and Verbena. Some, like meadowsweet and cowslips, sweet flag and spikenard, are like the names of Shakespeare fairies.
Chuck Palahniuk
#36. Everyone wrote our obituary but us and the coaches and the kids who stayed with us. The obit was, 'Vanderbilt will have to leave the Southeastern Conference. All the coaches are leaving, and all the students are transferring.'
Gordon Gee
#37. Stay fit and live long and prosper, but write your own obituary now, while you can, just in case.
Jill Conner Browne
#38. 196. "Look on the bright side, suicide
Lost eyesight I'm on your side
Angel left wing, right wing, broken wing
Lack of iron and/or sleeping
Protector of the kennel
Ecto-plasma, Ecto-skeletal
Obituary birthday
Your scent is still here in my place of recovery!" ~
Kurt Cobain
#39. We're all killers at heart ... I have never taken anybody's life, but I have often read obituary notices with considerable satisfaction.
Clarence Darrow
#40. When I die, if the word 'thong' appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I've screwed up.
Albert Brooks
#41. Write your dream obituary and live that life!
Tami Holzman
#42. We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.
Marcel Proust
#43. So what if someone wrote your obituary ... that doesn't mean you are obligated to die.
Lou Holtz
#44. Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint's obituary.
Rupert Murdoch
#45. I get up every morning and read the obituary column. If my name's not there, I eat breakfast.
George Burns
#46. I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.
Benjamin Franklin
#47. HARV, can you help at all here?" I asked, spinning downward.
"I am writing your obituary. Well, not so much writing it as updating it," HARV told me.
If I lived, I was going to kill HARV.
John Zakour
#48. Some people want to amass a great amount of wealth and make a great looking obituary. I'm going to die with more money than is good to leave my son.
Darrell Issa
#49. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grasshopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#50. You should never write your own resume, personal ad, or obituary. In all three cases it is better to show your humility by letting someone else lie for you.
David Hayden
#51. Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
Philip Guedalla
#52. A common defense among obituary-fanciers such as myself is that the obit is not about death at all. It is about life. This is true since an article about the condition of deadness would make for turgid reading at best.
Tom Rachman
#53. I've always thought stability was suffocating and deadly. Like, when I read that the kids I went to law school with have stayed at the same firm, I feel like I'm reading an obituary. How much money do you need? Six million, seven million? Put that in the bank and do something else. Get out!
Glenn Greenwald
#54. Women are quoted as sources and appear on interview shows much less frequently than men ... But the by-product of such anonymity may be immortality, for women are also less likely to find themselves written up on the obituary page.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson
#55. Al-Qaeda's obituary has been written countless times over the decade. Each iteration has proved to be ephemeral, as the moment has continually shown itself to have a deeper bench than we imagine.
Bruce Hoffman
#56. Live so that when the final summons comes you will leave something more behind you than an epitaph on a tombstone or an obituary in a newspaper.
Billy Sunday
#57. It would be too much for me to deal with to be sitting up there next to God, Bon Scott, Sid Vicious, and Jimi Hendrix, and hear somebody read my obituary from below:
NIKKI SIXX DIED TODAY ... FUCKING GOLFING
Nikki Sixx
#58. And most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another, being oft associated, until not even obituary notices them do part.
O. Henry
#59. It's always the end for now, and in real life, the only full stop is on the obituary page.
Stephen King
#60. As the victim of those impulses she must be looking in the paper for his obituary.
Saul Bellow
#61. When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit
Nicole Krauss
#62. Obituary: He/she is survived by his/her Want-to-Read/Currently-Reading Goodreads shelf
Brian Alan Ellis
#63. It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't
P.G. Wodehouse
#64. Men in the uniform of Wall Street retirement: black Chesterfield coat, rimless glasses and the Times folded to the obituary page..
Jimmy Breslin
#65. One phrase you don't want kicking off your obituary is, Never, in the long history of bungee jumping ...
Dana Gould
#66. If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.
Freeman Dyson
#67. Producing obituaries is a way of creating a legacy to remember important people of our times and their contributions. No matter whose obituary it is, I look for something inspirational about each person.
Laurie Nadel
#68. Obituary for Edith Hahn Beer from the Times (UK) This obituary was published in the March 26, 2009, edition of the London Times. Reprinted with permission of the Times, London. EDITH HAHN-BEER escaped probable extermination as a Jew in wartime Germany by assuming a
Edith Hahn Beer
#69. Anyone who has to write an obituary for me one day will probably say, 'She did absolute depths of agony really well.' I'm not, however, an unhappy person.
Lesley Manville
#70. A few years ago I wrote two versions of my obituary, the one I wanted and the one I was heading for. They were very different. I realized I needed to make some big changes if I was going to look back and be proud of my life. I am making those changes, and now I have a life worth living.
Roz Savage
#71. I always wondered what hearing one's own obituary might sound like, and I sort of feel like I may have just heard part of it at least.
Spencer Abraham
#72. If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren't, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?
Padgett Powell
#73. There's the obituary to look for the next week, six column inches about nothing that really mattered
Chuck Palahniuk
#74. He once told a reporter he wanted his obituary to be short - "just make it born in Russia, first lesson at 3, debut at 7, debut in America in 1917".
Jascha Heifetz
#75. This won't look so good in my obituary," Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly-spoken words."Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria.
Alistair MacLean
#76. I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America' dies.' Unless I'm completely forgotten, and then it won't say anything at all.
Tony Kushner
#77. Bast crouched down and began making weird chittering noises. Uh-oh. She was imitating birds. I'd seen enough cats do this when they were stalking. Suddenly my own obituary flashed in my head: Carter Kane, 14, tragically died in Paris wen he was eaten by his sister's cat, Muffin.
Rick Riordan
#78. Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.
James Joyce
#79. It's not the loss of life that makes the death bitter
it's the obituaries.
Evan Esar
#80. As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.
Christopher Hitchens
#81. Yet for quixotic reasons
namely, that I enjoyed writing obits
I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
Avi Steinberg
#82. Metaphysics keeps surviving its obituaries.
Mason Cooley
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