Bury Our Dead Quotes & Sayings

Help when you can; do everything then - but when you can no longer do anything, forget it! Turn away! Pull yourself together. Compassion is meant for quiet times. Not when life is at stake. Bury the dead and devour life! You'll still need it. Mourning is one thing, facts are another. One doesn't mourn less when one sees the facts and accepts them. That is how one survives. — Erich Maria Remarque

Max had said two things to Jean during their good-byes. First, that one had to gaze upon the dead, cremate them and bury their ashes--and then begin to tell their story. "Remain silent about the dead, and they'll never leave you in peace. — Nina George

One Soviet general, looking at a map of the territory Russia had acquired on the Karelian Isthmus, is said to have remarked: "We have won just about enough ground to bury our dead — William R. Trotter

There are those, too, who are ethnically predisposed in favor of funerals, who recognize among the black drapes and dirges an emotionally potent and spiritually stimulating intersection of the living and the dead. In death and its rituals, they see the leveled playing field so elusive in life. Whether we bury our dead in Wilbert Vaults, leave them in trees to be eaten by birds, burn them or beam them into space; whether choir or cantor, piper or jazz band, casket or coffin or winding sheet, ours is the species that keeps track of our dead and knows that we are always outnumbered by them. — Thomas Lynch

When I am dead, I charge you to mingle our ashes and bury us together. — Madeline Miller

First, that one had to gaze upon the dead, cremate them and bury their ashes - and then begin to tell their story. — Nina George

I suspect if we were as familiar with our bones as with our skin, we'd never bury dead but shrine them in their rooms, arranged as we might like to find them on a visit; and our enemies, if we could steal their bodies from the battle sites, would be museumed as they died, the steel still eloquent in their sides, their metal hats askew, the protective toes of their shoes unworn, and friend and enemy would be so wondrously historical that in a hundred years we'd find the jaws still hung for the same speech and all the parts we spent our life with titled as they always were - rib cage, collar, skull - still repetitious, still defiant, angel light, still worthy of memorial and affection. After all, what does it mean to say that when our cat has bitten through the shell and put confusion in the pulp, the life goes out of them? Alas for us, I want to cry, our bones are secret, showing last, so we must love what perishes: the muscles and the waters and the fats. — William H Gass

It's time to write dangerous music. It's time to take risks. It's time to wear your heart on your sleeve, and sing about the things that actually matter to you. It's time to bury the shackles of religious expectation and stop trying to put new clothes on the dead. — John Mark McMillan

Sweetheart, I'll be a Marine 'til they bury my cold, dead, decrepit ass in the ground a good fifty or sixty years from now. — Dee Tenorio

Don't bury me but instead use me as fertilizer to grow a tree..I can prove to you im useful both alive and dead — Me

To bury something, it is often considered, either means the end of something or the passing on into the realm of the earth or the sky, only the dead could ever know. But it is not only the dead that we bury. We bury objects, memories, thoughts and emotions among other things. Contrary to popular belief burying something is not the end of it because even though it is suppressed beneath layers of earth or self control, the dead and buried don't always remain that way and that is where the stories come from, the stories that haunt us for the rest of our no longer carefree lives. — Shitij Sharma

We all like to think we'll grow up,' Beatrice said. 'History's the one dream we all try and dream together.'
I don't want to grow up.'
You already have.'
I want to grow down. I want to bury myself in the hard earth. I want to root myself there like a dead tree. I want to entangle myself in the earth's heart so nobody can ever pull me out. — Scott Bradfield

Montjoy, the French herald, comes to the English king under a flag of truce and asks that they be permitted to bury their dead and "Sort our nobles from our common men; For many of our princes (wo the while!) Lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood; So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs In blood of princes." (Henry V., Act 4, Sc. 7.) With equal courtesy Richard III., on Bosworth field, speaks of his opponents to the gentlemen around him: "Remember what you are to cope withal - A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways, A scum of Bretagne and base lackey peasants." (Act 5, Sc. 3.) — William Shakespeare

That's what I meant when I said that about the cheek of Woman as a sex. What I mean is, after what had happened, you'd have thought she would have preferred to let the dead past bury its dead, and all that sort of thing, what? — P.G. Wodehouse

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain. Hannah Arendt — Hannah Arendt

One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the other firm. Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the plague. Quicklime feverpits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes. Or bury at sea. Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by birds. Earth, fire, water. Drowning they say is the pleasantest. See your whole life in a flash. But being brought back to life no. Can't bury in the air however. Out of a flying machine. Wonder — James Joyce

In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace.
All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books. — Richard De Bury

The Kikuyu, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the hyenas and vultures to deal with. The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars, and to be so promptly, neatly, and openly picked and cleansed; to be made one with Nature and become a common component of a landscape. — Karen Blixen

Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth. Some have always been broken. All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges ... block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts.
People don't bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed. — Robert Dunbar

When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort. But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams. — Thomas Lynch

But it pleased God to visit us then with death daily, and with so general a disease that the living were scarce able to bury the dead. — William Bradford

Go. Go to your beautiful dances, your beautiful ceremonies. And we will bury our dead. — Lily King

If you're going to bury the past, bury it deep, girl. Shallow Graves always give up their dead. — Jennifer Donnelly

Taste this." Rick held out a wooden spoon smothered in sauce, cradling the underside with his free hand.

"That's heaven." Laney licked the spoon clean. "When I die, bury me in a vat of that." She kissed Rick on the lips and heaved the groceries onto the counter.

"I feel like I'll be too sad to cook that much, what with you dead and all." He turned back to the pot, stirring the sauce as gently as he'd handle a newborn baby. "Though if we have a little advance warning, I could stockpile it in the freezer."

"Absolutely. I'll do what I can to die a slow death." Laney smirked. "All in the name of the sauce, of course. — Emily Liebert

Say, "This misery that I am suffering is of my own doing, and that very thing proves that it will have to be undone by me alone." That which I created, I can demolish; that which is created by some one else I shall never be able to destroy. Therefore, stand up, be bold, be strong. Take the whole responsibility on your own shoulders, and know that you are the creator of your own destiny. All the strength and succour you want is within yourselves. Therefore, make your own future. "Let the dead past bury its dead." The infinite future is before you, and you must always remember that each word, thought, and deed, lays up a store for you and that as the bad thoughts and bad works are ready to spring upon you like tigers, so also there is the inspiring hope that the good thoughts and good deeds are ready with the power of a hundred thousand angels to defend you always and for ever. (II. 225) — Swami Vivekananda

Every fellow is really two men
what he is and what he might be; and you're never absolutely sure which you're going to bury till he's dead. — George Horace Lorimer

All the strength and succour you want is within yourselves. Therefore make your own future. "Let the dead past bury its dead." The infinite future is before you. — Swami Vivekananda

I'm just happy we're cool. I just want to go back to being the type of friends who have fun. Give each other rides. Bury dead bodies together. Be each other's alibis. — G.L. Tomas

Our blessed Savior chose the Garden for his Oratory, and dying, for the place of his Sepulchre; and we do avouch for many weighty causes, that there are none more fit to bury our dead in than in our Gardens and Groves, where our Beds may be decked with verdant and fragrant flowers, Trees and Perennial Plants, the most natural and instructive Hieroglyphics of our expected Resurrection and Immortality. — John Evelyn

My heart, as I closed the cabinet and rose to my feet, was a small dead creature. If I could bury it in the woods, I would. — Lauren Myracle

Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore? For my ninth birthday last year, Grandma gave me a subscription to National Geographic, which she calls "the National Geographic." She also gave me a white blazer, because I only wear white clothes, and it's too big to wear so it will last me a long time. She also gave me Grandpa's camera, which I loved for two reasons. I asked why he didn't take it with him when he left her. She said, "Maybe he wanted you to have it."
I said, "But I was negative-thirty years old." She said, "Still." Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls! — Jonathan Safran Foer

This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead. — John Green

If you take epitaphs seriously, we ought to bury the living and resurrect the dead. — Mark Twain

One dead body required two men either to bury it or to transport it to the rear. A wounded soldier, on the other hand, immobilized five men for an indeterminate amount of time; and who knew whether it was even worth the effort. — Stephane Audeguy

Let the dead Past bury its dead! — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses - sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him. — Mark Twain

If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In a world where no one listens, where no one seems to care, where hatred is greater than love, where hearts are hardened by vengeance and pride, where violence is preferable to peace, what else is there for him to do but heal the wounded, and bury the dead, in a war that could go on forever? — Ben Okri

A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot. — Billy Wilder

Forget the past, let the dead bury the dead. Things were working out fine, and that was the only thing he had to remember. — Robert Bloch

If they die, we bury them; if they don't, we won't. — Allan Dare Pearce

Our loves ones truly are ever-present. We may bury their bodies or scatter their ashes, but their spirits are boundless and do not accompany them to the grave. The terms 'letting go' and 'closure' are just empty words. They mean nothing to someone who has suffered through the death of a loved one. Instead of insisting on figuratively burying our dead, why not keep them close to us? Love doesn't die when we do. — April Slaughter

As they helped Max clear the few dishes they used, he told them the plan for tomorrow. "It's our custom to bury our dead at sunrise," he said. "We believe that dawn is the time of renewal. Endings and beginnings are inseparable, like the moment before dawn and the moment after." "That's — Kass Morgan

Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. — Madeline Miller

Italy. 'I must use my freedom while I feel so much strength and youth in me,' he said to himself. 'Pierre was right when he said we must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead, but while there is life we must live and be happy!' thought he. — Leo Tolstoy

The best place to bury a dead love is deep in the depths of memory where it can be cherished forever. — Georgina Gentry

But, Isobel thought with a bleak and sad smile, what better place to bury what was dead than in a cemetery? — Kelly Creagh

Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy! thought — Leo Tolstoy

Hope is to our spirits what oxygen is to our lungs. Lose hope and you die. They may not bury you for awhile, but without hope you are dead inside. The only way to face the future is to fly straight into it on the wings of hope ... hope is the energy of the soul. Hope is the power of tomorrow. — Lewis B. Smedes

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun. — G.K. Chesterton

Why don't they embed the dead in blocks of plate glass and bury them in crypts beneath transparent floors? In that way, the deceased would easily be able to see God for themselves, and He to see them, — Alan Bradley

As they were traveling on the road someone said to Him, "I will follow You wherever You go! " 58 Jesus told him, "Foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head." 59 Then He said to another, "Follow Me." "Lord," he said, "first let me go bury my father." 60 But He told him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and spread the news of the kingdom of God." 61 Another also said, "I will follow You, Lord, but first let me go and say good-bye to those at my house." 62 But Jesus said to him, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. — Anonymous

"I'll carry him. We can't leave drag marks or anything, and we'll need to bury him right away, so no dogs find him."
"Bury who?" said a voice beside me.
I jumped so high, my heart rammed into my throat.
"Chloe?" Derek said again.
"It's L-Liam. His ghost."
Liam stopped. "Ghost?" He looked at me, then at his body, on the ground. He swore. — Kelley Armstrong

So now I have sworn to bury All this dead body of hate I feel so free and so clear By the loss of that dead weight — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Isn't it about time you got over that? Bury your dead, Jean Louise. — Harper Lee

Or you can fake your own death," Bill suggested.
"Because really, that's the most cathartic resolution - if all your friends and family think you're dead. Everyone cries, they have a little rant about all your potential going to waste, they put on a memorial service and you can hide and see who bothers to come - and if you're really lucky, they bury an empty coffin. When they couldn't even be bothered to spot you a twenty 'til payday. You know how much booze you could buy for the cost of a single coffin? — Jordan Castillo Price

God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment. — Aldous Huxley

We cannot build on peace on blood. We are still so addicted to this lie. We have this fantasy that we honor the dead by adding to their number. What we need to do is remember that these bodies bury us. This ocean of blood that we create through the fantasy that violence brings virtue drowns us, drowns our children, drowns our future, drowns the world. We have to understand that when we pour these endless young bodies into this pit of death, we follow ... — Stefan Molyneux

You should bury more than the dead.
You should try harder.
You should give up. — Olena Kalytiak Davis

We never bury the dead, son. Not really. We take them with us. It's the price of living. — C. Henry Parrish

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. "& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. "& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. "& that nobody is wished to see my dead body. "& that no mourners walk behind me at my funeral. "& that no flowers be planted on my grave, "& that no man remember me. "To this I put my name. — Thomas Hardy

Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it. — James Joyce

Have you ever wondered why we bury and cremate our dead? Nothing to do with hygiene, it's just so we don't have to see the reality of death. You know, the Zoroastrians used to leave their dead in open places for the birds to eat. Now that's a far more honest way to go, don't you agree? Everyone can see what happens. It makes us live our lives more potently. That's how I want to go, at my end: openly. Not ashamed of death, but embracing it. — Cliff James

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the "Nation," it's time for all of us to sit up and worry. — Arundhati Roy

"Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention. — Andre Gide

Let the dead bury the dead. — Harper Lee

Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy. — Leo Tolstoy

The things I need to say can only be written furtively on scraps of smuggled paper, in moments of time stolen from the dead for the sake of their memory. They can only be hidden away in tins and jars, carefully sealed with scraps of cloth and hidden with great fear and greater longing amid fragmented bones - buried in the uncaring ground soaked with our blood. We bury them as we could not bury our loved ones. These things can never be told. — Ovadya Ben Malka

They were thirsty; this Guillaume brought them water. It was from this well that he drew it. Many drank there their last draught. This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die itself. After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says they were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment, feeble voices were heard calling from the well. This well is isolated in the middle — Victor Hugo

Of course, if I were dead, they could just bury me, and move on. Broken is harder to deal with. — E.K. Johnston

Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he id watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved - so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living? Why? — Carson McCullers

Aubade with a Broken Neck The first night you don't come home summer rains shake the clematis. I bury the dead moth I found in our bed, scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough with dirt. The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth a twitching nightjar. In her panic, she sings in his mouth. He gives me her pain like a gift, and I take it. I hear the cries of her young, greedy with need, expecting her return, but I don't let her go until I get into the house. I read the auspices - the way she flutters against the wallpaper's moldy roses means all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling means a storm approaches. You should see her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing at the starless window, her body a dart, her body the arrow of longing, aimed, as all desperate things are, to crash not into the object of desire, but into the darkness behind it. — Traci Brimhall

In editing a volume of Washington's private letters for the Long Island Historical Society, I have been much impressed by indications that this great historic personality represented the Liberal religious tendency of his time. That tendency was to respect religious organizations as part of the social order, which required some minister to visit the sick, bury the dead, and perform marriages. It was considered in nowise inconsistent with disbelief of the clergyman's doctrines to contribute to his support, or even to be a vestryman in his church.
In his many letters to his adopted nephew and younger relatives, he admonishes them about their manners and morals, but in no case have I been able to discover any suggestion that they should read the Bible, keep the Sabbath, go to church, or any warning against Infidelity.
Washington had in his library the writings of Paine, Priestley, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and other heretical works.
[The Religion of Washington] — Moncure D. Conway

In our memories, there is a graveyard where we bury our dead. They all lie there together, the loved ones and the ones we hated, friends and foes and kin, with no distinction among them. We have to mourn every one of them, because our memories have made them as much a part of us as our bones or our skin. If we don't, we've no right to remember anything at all. — Steven Brust