Quotes About Death And Funeral

#1. Visit me before I die. We can enjoy one another's company. A funeral is a rather one-sided affair.

Ralph Webster

#2. There is a sort of melancholy pleasure to be had out of a funeral, with its pomp and ceremony, but I shrank from a death-bed.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

#3. For 3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person. (on Margaret Thatcher)

Frankie Boyle

#4. According to the Talmud, if a funeral procession and a wedding procession cross paths, the wedding party goes first. Life is more important than death.

Anita Diamant

#5. In perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. (Forever and ever, brother, hail and farewell.)

Catullus

#6. It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.

Ann-Marie MacDonald

#7. A comedy ends with a wedding, and a tragedy ends with a funeral: you always have to juxtapose sex and death.

Chuck Palahniuk

#8. A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, and committal read. But somehow the corpse never stays put.

Bernard Ramm

#9. He is but as the stubble of the field, and yet he has no beard.

Marguerite Young

#10. Most people are not really scared of death. They are merely terrified of being taken to a mortuary and/or being buried or cremated and/or being forgotten.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#11. Man should ever look to his last day, and no one should be called happy before his funeral.
[Lat., Ultima semper
Expectanda dies homini est, dicique beatus
Ante obitum nemo et suprema funera debet.]

Ovid

#12. He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides

Gustave Flaubert

#13. Whenever I start thinking about death, it always cheers me up to think about my funeral and my tombstone (which, by the way, will say "Here lies Harlan Sturr. Please don't pee on him.")

Adam Selzer

#14. I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over,' said Amanda in a scandalized voice.
'It's her own funeral, you know,' said Sir Lulworth; 'it's a nice point in etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one's own mortal remains.' ("Laura")

Saki

#15. I narrate the story but he dies off-stage between commercials. A washing machine ad later, we are dressed in our funereal best. We sniffle and indulge in product placement for Kleenex. The credits roll.

Thomm Quackenbush

#16. The purpose of a funeral service is to comfort the living. It is important at a funeral to display excessive grief. This will show others how kind-hearted and loving you are and their improved opinion of you will be very comforting.

P. J. O'Rourke

#17. You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.

Neil Gaiman

#18. I was fantasising about my own death, I started thinking what my funeral would be like and what music would be played, I was at that level of insanity.

Billy Corgan

#19. You are despicable and such cowards that you won't even share your dead bodies with the Earth, but put them inside wooden and metal coffins to "protect" them. From what?

Carl Abrahamsson

#20. It was very sad under the trees. Although spring was well advanced, in the deep shade there was nothing but death-rotten leaves, gray and white fungi, and over everything a funeral hush.

Nathanael West

#21. People are usually pretty hungry after a funeral. I guess it's because we all realize that time is running out and we better eat all we can. Please don't mention that to my mother.

Peter Hedges

#22. The end
When I die bang on cans
Romp around in leaps and bounds
Let whips crack in the air
Call in clowns and acrobats!
I want my coffin to go on a donkey
Decked out in Andalusian style
You can't refuse anything to a dead man
And I want, by all means, go on a donkey

Mario De Sa-Carneiro

#23. I was dead, and I hadn't even been able to attend my own funeral.

Meg Cabot

#24. You broke me bodily.
The heart ain't the half of it,
And I'll never learn to laugh at it
In my good natured way.
In fact, I'm laughing less in general,
But I learned a lot at my own funeral.
And I knew you'd be the death of me,
So I guess that's the price I pay.

Ani DiFranco

#25. Death is a mighty mediator. There all the flames of rage are extinguished, hatred is appeased, and angelic pity, like a weeping sister, bends with gentle and close embrace over the funeral urn.

Friedrich Schiller

#26. The dead man is on the trolley and the woman collapses across his chest. That's what the ghouls want a shufti at, like at that Princess Diana's funeral, they want to scrutinise those who really knew her, to drink the misery out of their faces.

Irvine Welsh

#27. And a funeral, I found out, is like a wedding in reverse, with less time to plan.

J. Lincoln Fenn

#28. Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?

Daniele Vare

#29. You know all my life I've hated funerals. The fuss and bother never brings anybody back. It just spoils remembering them as they really are. And when I see people actually facing it that way, I have to act like a sap.

Jules Furthman

#30. Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.

Robyn Schneider

#31. Charlie started crying, in the convulsive, soundless way that men do. "Don't you understand," he said after composing himself, "that's a funeral dirge for the first wave." We all thought about that, the many lives lost before we even opened our eyes this morning.

Suzanne Hayes

#32. It was like a bomb had just gone off in the kitchen, and instead of cleaning up the rubble, people were stepping around it and eating mini-quiche.

Morgan Matson

#33. I hadn't understood funeral pyres before, but now I do. It's ghastly to burn someone you love but watching the smoke going into the sky, I think that's rather beautiful now. And I wish Tess could be up in the sky. Somewhere with color and light and air.

Rosamund Lupton

#34. Your coffin reached the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you.

Rosamund Lupton

#35. We may all host ourselves to death, and if we're all dead who will host our funerals?

Amy Poehler

#36. I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head.
And there is no hurry about it;
I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,
Seeing that long standing increases all things
regardless of quality.

Ezra Pound

#37. *Live fast, die young, and, leave a good looking corpse.* is dumb. When dead, looks matters not. (Furthermore, the corpse will only look good for a day, or, twelve.)

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#38. Sensei says funerals are not really for the dead. They are for those left behind. "The dead are long gone by the time a funeral is held," he told us. "Who would wait when the doors of Heaven are open? Only the living would be foolish enough to still hang around on earth.

Sandy Fussell

#39. Conner hadn't liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he'd learned from his grandmother's funeral that you have to go. It's expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief - a little or a lot - is tucked into your pocket and carried away.

Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson

#40. Wouldst thou find my ashes? Look
In the pages of my book;
And as these thy hand doth turn,
Know here is my funeral urn.

Adelaide Crapsey

#41. About Thatcher's death: Let's privatise her funeral. Put it out on competetive tender and accept the cheapest bid. That's what she would have wanted.

Ken Loach

#42. Don't cry for the dead, for the dead is deaf, dumb, blind, lame, unemotional and dead.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#43. When, with a smile, she let the dirt slip slowly across her curled palm and out the side of her hand onto the coffin, the gesture looked like the prelude to a carnal act. Clearly this was a man to whom she'd once given much thought.

Philip Roth

#44. I can't think of a more wonderful thanksgiving for the life I have had than that everyone should be jolly at my funeral

Lord Mountbatten

#45. Our birthday is celebrated every year to commemorate the very first instant we came into the world, and a funeral is held to mark the day we leave it. But lately I've been wondering ... what can be said of all the moments in between our birth and our death? The moments when we are reborn ...

Taylor Swift

#46. I remembered back to leo's burial and holding your hand. I was eleven and you were six, your hand soft and small in mine. As the vicar said 'in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of eternal life' you turned to me, 'I don't want sure and certain hope I want sure and certain Bee.

Rosamund Lupton

#47. There is but one freedom, To put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved, and not the reverse.

Albert Camus

#48. I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death, of their lovers, friends and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets.

David Wojnarowicz

#49. If God hath made this world so fair,
Where sin and death abound,
How beautiful beyond compare
Will paradise be found!

James Montgomery

#50. I really want Americans, and all of us, to be less afraid of death, and know that it's a passage, but that - don't go to the funeral before the day of the funeral.

Valerie Harper

#51. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

John Knowles

#52. Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#53. Funeral: a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears.

Ambrose Bierce

#54. I don't even like cemeteries. Morgues, either, nor anatomy museums, undertakers' parlors, funeral chapels, or any of those places where the world of the living sparks against the world of the dead, and a spot of burned out time fades, diffuse in an ocean of timelessness.

Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

#55. It was a haunting tune, unresigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind and say goodbye.

Kristin Cashore

#56. It's not what I'd want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.

Neil Gaiman

#57. I wish to declare with all earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in such ceremonies, and to submit to them, even as a matter of form, would be hypocrisy and an attempt to delude ourselves and others.

Jawaharlal Nehru

#58. Ana was the original sad girl. She held the unofficial title long before her death. We all became sad girls after that. At her funeral, everyone wore black because it was customary and because it was the color that best defined Ana.

Lang Leav

#59. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

Cormac McCarthy

#60. It is sad to fill a grave with a person full of potential yet completely emptied of anymore possibility to try it once again.

Johnnie Dent Jr.

#61. Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life.

Plutarch

#62. *Paying one's last respects* is about the payer, not the paid. (Who attends the funeral - and who doesn't - is the deceased's last worry.)

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#63. Put no inscription over the grave, except the date of my birth and my death; and, wherever I am buried, let the funeral be perfectly private, with as few persons attending, and as little show and expense as possible.

Isaac Butt

#64. I want them to play Britney Spears at my funeral. This way I won't feel so bad about being dead, and everyone there will know there is something worse than Death.

Gary Numan

#65. Man's last day must ever be awaited and none to be
counted happy until his death, until his last funeral rites
are paid.

Ovid