Quotes About Obituaries

#1. David [Halberstam] kept on doing what he did because he loved it. One of the obituaries I read quoted him as saying that he did journalism for the same reason the great Julius Irving did basketball: He loved doing it even when he was having a bad day.

Jonathan Yardley

#2. When I saw the photograph I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me.
I had allowed other people to think he was dead.
I had allowed him to be buried alive.

Joan Didion

#3. The obituaries shot up to the top of my list when I discovered Robert McG. Thomas, the 'Times' obit writer who redesigned its traditional form and added a measure of stylistic elegance.

Billy Collins

#4. I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'

Tao Lin

#5. I turn to the 'Telegraph's' obituaries page with trepidation.

Christopher Lee

#6. If you start the day reading the obituaries, you live your day a little differently.

David Levithan

#7. I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

Clarence Darrow

#8. My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies.

Bill Paxton

#9. Here's what I know: I eat mass quantities of red meat, curse religiously, sing out of tune but with conviction. I cry when it suits me, laugh when it's inopportune, read The New York Times obituaries and wedding announcements, out loud and in that order.

Julie Buxbaum

#10. A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.'

Billy Collins

#11. It's like obituaries, when you die they finally give you good reviews.

Roger Maris

#12. I feel like my career has been a series of glowing obituaries.

Michael Ian Black

#13. I think the idea of fact-checking, I think the idea that you come up through a system where you know how to cover night cops, and then you go on, and you go on to various beats, including writing obituaries, and you get names right, you know how to spell them, really has some advantages to it.

Juan Williams

#14. Metaphysics keeps surviving its obituaries.

Mason Cooley

#15. I watched the coral reefs that I studied as a student vanish in the blink of an eye, and for decades I wrote and spoke of ocean obituaries. But big scary problems without solutions lead to apathy, not action.

Nancy Knowlton

#16. I don't listen to the news. I don't read the newspaper unless it's eccentric information - and the obituaries, of course.

Maira Kalman

#17. A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.

Georges F. Doriot

#18. I think all the obituaries for newspapers we're hearing are premature. Many papers are belatedly but successfully adapting to the new news environment. I

Arianna Huffington

#19. Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards.

Austin Kleon

#20. The Echo was a rag specializing in yard sales, area sports, and town politics. The residents scanned those things, he supposed, but mostly bought the paper for the obituaries and Police Beat. Everybody liked to know which of their neighbors had died or been jailed.

Stephen King

#21. I read obituaries first thing in the morning. With a cup of coffee. This is NOT MORBID. Just epic. Maybe it's a way of trying to figure out, before the day begins, what is important. And I am curious about all the little things that make up life. Little?

Maira Kalman

#22. People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.

Ellen Goodman

#23. When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

Don DeLillo

#24. I scrolled on down to the obituaries. I usually read the obituaries first as there is always the happy chance that one of them will make my day.

Robert A. Heinlein

#25. Chronology of any event worked best in obituaries. It had no place in the world of sentiment, where memories, ideas and assumptions co-existed side by side.

Noorilhuda

#26. It's not the loss of life that makes the death bitter
it's the obituaries.

Evan Esar

#27. Obituaries were among my favorite to write because they have elements no other news stories have - a story from start to finish with a proper conclusion.

Tom Rachman

#28. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

Charles Wheelan

#29. When I wake up in the morning, I immediately check the morning paper. If my name is not in the obituaries, I get up

Benjamin Franklin

#30. I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.

Sarah Manguso

#31. There's a magical part of it (writing obituaries), too, which is you're trying to breathe life back into someone who has just died. You're trying to conjure them up.

Marilyn Johnson

#32. I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.

Mark Twain

#33. 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

#34. In general, writers never find out how strong their talent is: that investigation begins with their obituaries. In the USSR, writers found out how good they were when they were still alive. If the talent was strong, only luck or silence could save them.

Martin Amis

#35. Oh definitely. It'll be in a hot tub, with my entire head squeezed into a jet. The photos are going to be hilarious. Man, I really hope the internet sticks around so people can reference this article in my obituaries and see that what sounds like a joke was actually amazingly prescient.

Jason Sudeikis

#36. He was obsessed with obituaries. She'd never read them before, he couldn't believe it, to him it was like someone who'd never read the funnies...Michael always wanted to know what they died of- accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. 'Was it suicide?' That's what he really wanted to know.

Janet Fitch

#37. I've done a lot of death cartoons - tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries ... I'm not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes.

Roz Chast

#38. It's sad that grandkids show up at the end of obituaries, way behind the list of work place achievements, social clubs and survivors. Why last? If you've got grandkids, you know they're first when it comes to the joy in your life.

Regina Brett

#39. I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

Erma Bombeck

#40. I personally believe breathatarianism to be the highest mode of human living [ ... ] breathing in pure air, absorbing the direct light and energies of the sun, bathing in pure water [ ... ] I look at the obituaries every morning and ain't nobody listed but you eaters.

Dick Gregory

#41. 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

#42. Good priests never look for awards and, perversely enough in the clerical culture universe, do not receive many. Like the aged nuns who taught selflessly and nearly anonymously all their lives, these servants of the People of God only get into the papers when their obituaries are printed.

Eugene Kennedy

#43. Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.

Bill Cosby

#44. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

Christopher Hitchens

#45. Every morning I read the obituaries. If it ain't there I make myself a cup of tea and carry on like I have the past century or so.

Lois Greiman