quotations about funerals
In my recent experiences with death and funerals, I have come to appreciate the need for rituals, for the ceremony, where once I simply felt impatience, even disgust, at the whole procedure. It is hard, though, hard to make a meaningful ceremony out of death in America in our time. Certainly the funeral industry isn't interested in authenticity, it's interested in efficiency, profit, and assembly-line repetition.
ADOLF HESCHL
Das Intelligente Genom
People feel guilty enough at funerals without having more guilt heaped on. I would prefer a bighearted preacher giving my eulogy, someone inclined to widen heaven's doors. I don't want to leave folks wondering whether I made it.
PHILIP GULLEY
For Everything a Season
It is extremely hard to have a funeral when you don't have anything to bury.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
A Dangerous Age
After Auschwitz, I no longer cry at funerals.
CHARLOTTE DELBO
Auschwitz and After
Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
There was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin -- an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Homer & Langley
Goin' to the funeral home
Got me a coffin
Shiny and black
I'm goin' to the funeral
And I'm never comin' back
DANIEL JOHNSTON
"Funeral Home", Continued Story
Most souls attend their funerals and have some feelings about them, but it's such an individual event. Some souls don't care what happens to their physical bodies. They see the funeral as a ritual for the living so they don't always attend.
ECHO L. BODINE
Echoes of the Soul
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.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
Enemies always attend each other's funerals. I guess it is a way of knowing they won.
M.C.V. EGAN
Defined by Others
Never joke at funerals, or during business transactions.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Israel Potter
Thou art gone to the grave; but we will not deplore thee,
Though sorrows and darkness encompass the tomb.
REGINALD HEBER
"At a Funeral"
You always wonder about your funeral. How big? Who'll show up? In the end it's meaningless. You realize, once you die, that a funeral as for everyone else, not you.
MITCH ALBOM
The Next Person You Meet in Heaven
The dead do not know the value of white sheets.
HAITIAN PROVERB
In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of entertainment.
GEORGE ADE
Cosmopolitan Magazine, Feb. 1928
I don't like funerals and don't want one after I die. Of course I won't have anything to say about it.
GENE AMOLE
The Last Chapter
They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"Lecture in San Francisco,", Lake Wobegon Days
If the cost of funerals continues to go up, some people will be better off alive.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.
E.M. FORSTER
Howard's End
Funerals open a door normally closed, showing the raw humanity of so many.
CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTES
"Michael Jackson: The Black Tribal Funeral", The Moderate Voice, July 7, 2009