Best Graveyard Quotes & Sayings

Showmen's Rest was truly something to behold. Throughout the entire yard, statues and carvings of elephants, clowns, and tight-rope walkers danced on the gray and white surfaces of tombstones and grave-markers. For the first time, Michael got the feeling that the men and women who'd been buried there were probably really happy with their final resting place. It was a touching tribute, one that honored their passion in life and that had been constructed out of love and respect. — Jacqueline E. Smith

it her fault that the graveyard has the best dirt? She loves her plants! Just — Ellen Cooney

You don't need a sad soul
to feel the beauty of a dead grave
Just stay with the pale moon
when darkness wants the night to be brave — Munia Khan

Death possesses a good deal, of real estate, namely, the graveyard in every town. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

collected promotional mugs for all eight of the banks which collapsed beneath me. I lined them up in each new cubicle like heads on poles outside of a cannibal village. My resume was a graveyard of once powerful institutions. — Jeremy Robert Johnson

Six Lines

I know that in this world no one needs me,
me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard
Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?

Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty
and only the ephemeral is godly
and humility is the only true rebellion — Aaron Zeitlin

Great," Lee sighed, side-stepping through. "Just when I thought I'd gotten out of wandering through the creepy graveyard, you find another way."
Smiling as he followed her through, he assured her, "Don't worry, I'm a professional." He seemed to find her nervousness amusing.
"And just so you know," she grumbled, "this absolutely does not count as our date."
He burst out laughing. "That's too bad. Now I'll have to make other plans. How do you feel about abandoned insane asylums? — Kaye Thornbrugh

I'm fear less as far I can tell, but I can't go to the graveyard and sleep there. I need time to handle this! — Deyth Banger

At the graveyard there was no hope, so there was nothing to lose and no chance for disappointment. — Calista Lynne

The Republicans I've been talking to have said, 'Oh, the public is cynical about indictments, they happen so often.' Well, that's whistling past the graveyard, because the average voter is only going to remember that one of the big Republican head honchos in Congress was indicted. They won't remember the name or position, but they'll remember it says Congress is corrupt and maybe the majority party is corrupt. — Larry Sabato

He rests in the graveyard of Ivry
a suburb that always
looks like the day
the carnival comes down.
And perhaps only I
still know
that he was alive. — Giuseppe Ungaretti

Harry felt winded, as though he had just walked into something heavy. He had last seen those cool gray eyes through slits in a Death Eater's hood, and last heard that man's voice jeering in a dark graveyard while Lord Voldemort tortured him. He could not believe that Lucius Malfoy dared look him in the face; he could not believe that he was here, in the Ministry of Magic, or that Cornelius Fudge was talking to him, when Harry had told Fudge mere weeks ago that Malfoy was a Death Eater. — J.K. Rowling

Man is the only religious animal. In the Holy task of smoothing his brother's path to the happiness of heaven, he has turned the globe into a graveyard. — Mark Twain

Though no one had been buried here for almost thirty years, the grass was mown by yours truly. I felt a tidy graveyard made a happy graveyard. — Kim Harrison

Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects. — Paul Farmer

She doesn't approve of either sentimentality or graveyard humor at crime scenes. She says they waste time that should be spent working on the damn case, but the implication is that coping strategies are for wimps. — Tana French

A graveyard is not normally a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy, — Neil Gaiman

Some people asked me if I would be interested in managing the A's. I said a definite no thank you. At night, that place is a graveyard with lights. — Whitey Herzog

Warmth stole into Murdoch's voice at the memory, and Farah's heart clenched at the picture of her Dougan not yet a man, and yet not a boy, regaling a room full of hardened prisoners about the graveyard capers and bog adventures of a ten-year-old girl in the Scottish Highlands. "He described ye so many times, I feel as though any of us would have recognized ye had we seen ye on the streets. He told us of yer kindness, yer innocence, yer gentle ways and boundless curiosity. Ye became something of a patron saint to us all. Our daughter. Our sister. Our... Fairy. Without even knowing it, ye gave us- him- a little bit of sunshine and hope in a world of shadow and pain. — Kerrigan Byrne

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.
Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by the pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning. — Lawrence Hill

On Staten Island, there's a ship graveyard. I'm using that a lot, even for 'Under the Dome.' When I'm dissatisfied with a location scout, I go on Google Earth. It's an amazing tool. — Niels Arden Oplev

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion
several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven ... The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste. — Mark Twain

I want to be an example of a guy who made something of himself out of nothing. A guy who overcame the odds of a tough childhood, who worked hard, who didn't let his surroundings get the best of him and lead him to jail or the graveyard. Where I ended up - being a comedian, a TV star, and a movie actor - might be unique, but my story is not. — Tracy Morgan

The graveyard was at the top of the hill. It looked over all of the town. The town was hills - hills that issued down in trickles and then creeks and then rivers of cobblestone into the town, to flood the town with rough and beautiful stone that had been polished into smooth flatness over the centuries. It was a pointed irony that the very best view of the town could be had from the cemetery hill, where high, thick walls surrounded a collection of tombstones like wedding cakes, frosted with white angels and iced with ribbons and scrolls, one against another, toppling, shining cold. It was like a cake confectioner's yard. Some tombs were big as beds. From here, on freezing evenings, you could look down at the candle-lit valley, hear dogs bark, sharp as tuning forks banged on a flat stone, see all the funeral processions coming up the hill in the dark, coffins balanced on shoulders.
("The Candy Skull") — Ray Bradbury

I believe hurling is the best of us, one of the greatest and most beautiful expressions of what we can be. For me that is the perspective that death and loss cast on the game. If you could live again you would hurl more, because that is living. You'd pay less attention to the rows and the mortgage and the car and all the daily drudge. Hurling is our song and our verse, and when I walk in the graveyard in Cloyne and look at the familiar names on the headstones I know that their ownders would want us to hurl with more joy and more exuberance and more (as Frank Murphy used to tell us) abandon than before, because life is shorter than the second half of a tournament game that starts at dusk. — Donal Og Cusack

He dreams he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately's the best digger but he's wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he's eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can't really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he's got no idea who they're talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: TOO LATE. — David Foster Wallace

You feel bad about yelling in a graveyard after you just tried to have sex with me in a church? — Liliana Hart

I do not want to make my stomach a graveyard of dead animals. — George Bernard Shaw

Oh, I know I'll improve. It's just that my life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes now. That's a sentence I read once, and I say it over to comfort myself in these times that try the soul. — Anne Shirley

I am mad again, he thought. Tears brimmed. He swallowed in a tightened throat. I don't want to be. I'm tired, I'm tired and horny, I'm so tired I can't make sense out of any of it and my mind won't work right half the time I try. I'm thirsty. My head's all filled with kapok coffee wouldn't clear. Still, I wish I had some. Where am I going, what am I doing, stumbling in this smoking graveyard? It's not the pain; only that the pain keeps going on. He tried to let all his muscles go and stepped aimlessly from sidewalk to gutter, his mouth dryer and dryer and dryer. Well, he thought, if it hurts, it hurts. It's only pain. — Samuel R. Delany

It is far better to be happy than to have our bodies act as graveyards to animals. — Clement Of Alexandria

Cheshvan starts tonight," Rixon said, "What are you doing arsing around in a graveyard?"
"Thinking."
"Thinking?"
"A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision. — Becca Fitzpatrick

Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other? — Thomas Pynchon

My mother - my stepmother, really, she herself have been what they call an elocutionist. And she was the one who first encouraged me to write poetry, because she used to read it to us. And then when I began to write when I was nine years old, my first poem was published in the Amsterdam News. I called it "The Graveyard." — Ruby Dee

We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries. — Neil Gaiman

You know, radio DJ's must really love to talk to theirselves. Especially when they have the graveyard shift. 'Hey this is Ellen with 89.1. It is currently three in the morning. There are few cars on the road. And it your still listening heres a little music to get you to dance.. — Ellen DeGeneres

The best news the World has ever heard came from a graveyard - Christ is risen! — Soren Kierkegaard

Tell me if I'm mistaken, but isnt't that my girlfriend in the graveyard?"
"You are not mistaken."
"And she's straddling some guy."
"That's correct," said Colin.
Hassan pursed his lips and nodded. "And- I just want to make sure we have our facts straight here- she's naked."
"She certainly is."
...
And then he raced forward about ten paces, cupped his hands over his mouth, and screamed, "I AM BREAKING UP WITH YOU!" Still, though, a goofy grin was on his face. — John Green

Drunk were left alone in the graveyard. The priest looked down at the drunk disdainfully, and backed through the open door, which closed behind him, leaving the drunk on his own. The clockwork story was deeply unsettling. Much more unsettling, thought Shadow, than clockwork has any right to be. You know why I show that to you? — Neil Gaiman

I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue - I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him. — Neil Gaiman

My dear soul, flee from the worthless,
stay close only to those with a pure heart.
Like attracts like.
A crow will lead you to the graveyard,
a parrot to a lump of sugar. — Rumi

Edge of town
all graveyard
and the sound of waves — Santoka Taneda

When I arrived at the graveyard, Silla and her brother were sitting together snacking on cookies. They both wore jeans and sweaters and had blood on their foreheads. Like a gruesome splotch jerking you out of an otherwise pastoral scene. That happened to be a cemetery. Okay, it was all pretty gruesome. — Tessa Gratton

Let not death, nor the graveyard overcome you with fear, for every seed buried in its cold ground, resurrects forth anew, into a blossomed life. — Anthony Liccione

A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle.
"It's a place for burying dead folk," I say.
Her eyes widen. "A place for doing what?"
"Don't people die in space?" I ask.
"Yeah," she says. "But we burn them. We don't put them in holes." She crosses her arms around herself, mouth and forehead frowning, peering around at the graves. "How can this be sanitary? — Patrick Ness

Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard. — Henry David Thoreau