Quotes & Sayings About Coffins

Latro, California: "Terrible diarrhea, Doctor, and I feel so weak!" "Take these pills and come back in three days if you're not better."
Parkington, Texas: "Terrible diarrhea ... " "Take these pills ... "
Hainesport, Louisiana: "Terrible ... " "Take ... "
Baker Bay, Florida ...
Washington, DC ...
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ...
New York, New York ...
Boston, Massachusetts ...
Chicago, Illinois: "Doctor, I know it's Sunday, but the kid's in such a terrible state - you've got to help me!" "Give him some junior aspirin and bring him to my office tomorrow. Goodbye."
EVERYWHERE, USA: a sudden upswing in orders for very small coffins, the right size to take a baby dead from acute infantile enteritis. — John Brunner

Shoulda sent a thank you note, you little hoe Now Imma wrap your coffin wit a bow — Nicki Minaj

I was
the girl of the chain letter,
the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes,
the one of the telephone bills,
the wrinkled photo and the lost connections ... — Anne Sexton

I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud. — Thomas De Quincey

There's a coffin in the back of the church as the wedding is going on ... Look, I'm a romantic. I like marriage ... In the movies. — George Clooney

I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak. — Jeanette Winterson

THERE were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror - that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves. — Mark Twain

Shoes, men, coffins; never accept the first one you see. — Terry Pratchett

Your Honour, unless your Honour, without a moment's loss of time, makes sail for the nearest shore, this is a doomed ship, and her name is the Coffin! — Charles Dickens

The dead are lonelier than the living ever can be. They can't hear each other through coffins and the earth ... When I die I'd like to be buried in a mass grave. In a mass grave I wouldn't be afraid of the dark, and I'd be lonely only because my grandson will be missing me, the way I miss Grandpa Slavko now. — Sasa Stanisic

Being a man of the theater and a hedonist, I find the idea of building coffins very romantic. — Nick Offerman

I understand the power and the alarm of words - Not those that they applaud from theatre-boxes, but those which make coffins break from bearers and on their four oak legs walk right away. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

I'd rather look good in my coffin than bad in my coffin. — Ozzy Osbourne

Perhaps because it seems so appropriate, I don't notice the rain. It falls in sheets, a blanket of silvery thread rushing to the hard almost-winter ground. Still, I stand without moving at the side of the coffin. — Michelle Zink

All of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins. — Ray Bradbury

How may we be saints and live in golden coffins
Who will leave on our stone shelves
pathetic notes for intervention
How may we be calm marble gods at ocean altars
Who will murder us for some high reason — Leonard Cohen

A People Magazine article in 1982 referred to him as the late Abe Vigoda. The very-much-alive Vigoda placed an ad in Variety with him in a coffin holding a copy of People Magazine. — Audie Cornish

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him. — E. M. Forster

Everyone thinks of them in terms of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and forgets that they represent girls who walked into dark forests and remade them into their own reflections. — Seanan McGuire

(P)eople's good intentions can wind up putting us in boxes as confining as coffins. — Gayle Forman

My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar — Mark Antony

Don't you love to look at coffins? I've always enjoyed looking at one now and then. I think of a coffin as an absolutely lovely piece of furniture, even when it's empty, and if there's someone lying in it, it's really quite sublime in my eyes. — Thomas Mann

Every cradle asks us, Whence? and every coffin, Whither? The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The only way you can become a legend is in your coffin — Bette Davis

You were born with your legs apart. They'll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin. — Joe Orton

How many funerals had he attended, how many open graves had he seen, watched the coffins eased down, or sometimes just a frayed mat in which the corpse was bundled, the feet sticking out, the soles white and sometimes still specked with dirt if he was a farmer and could not afford slippers, least of all shoes.
-Istak — F. Sionil Jose

It's funny the things people say when someone dies.
He's in a better place.
How do you know that?
Life goes on.
That's supposed to comfort me? I'm excruciatingly aware that life goes on. It hurts every damned second. How lovely to know it's going to continue like this. Thank you for reminding me.
Time heals.
No, it doesn't. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue isn't a good thing. It's merely the wound's other face. — Karen Marie Moning

As I go about I see a lot of "coffin" men. They have room for themselves and nobody else. — Charles L. Allen

Today, a couple with 'just married' tags collided head-on with a hearse carrying two coffins in the back, both of a married couple that had previously
died in a car accident. — Anthony Liccione

My coming to England in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children's coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children. — Rudolf Hess

Several of the dusty Griever pods were opening, their top halves lifting upward on hinges like the lids of coffins. — James Dashner

building in there? Coffins. Lots and lots — Rhys Bowen

He's worse than Dracula because at least Dracula comes out of his coffin now and then. He seems to stay on his line and that's it. — Simon Mignolet

Time heals.
No, it doesn't. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue is not a good thing. It is merely the wound's other face. — Karen Marie Moning

My earrings are worth just enough to buy me a coffin if I die in a strange place. That was the reason why sailors used to wear them. — Morgan Freeman

Heaven and earth are my inner and outer coffins. The sun, moon, and stars are my drapery, and the whole creation my funeral procession. What more do I want? — Huston Smith

The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise. — Peter O'Toole

The consumer's side of the coffin lid is never ostentatious. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults. — Brian Selznick

It was never about money for us it was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something to those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins. We show them that the human spirit is still alive — Bhikkhu Bodhi

Oiled, with tube bones cut from bronze and sunk in gelatin, the robots lay. In coffins for the not dead and not alive, in planked boxes, the metronomes waited to be set in motion. There was a smell of lubrication and lathed brass. There was a silence of the tomb yard. Sexed but sexless, the robots. Named but unnamed, and borrowing from humans everything but humanity, the robots stared at the nailed lids of their labeled F.O.B. boxes, in a death that was not even a death, for there had never been a life. — Ray Bradbury

Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt, And every grin so merry draws one out. — John Wolcot

Most Americans are aware of the brutality and injustice used to maintain the excesses of their selfish consumer society and empire. Yet I suspect ... they do not care. They don't want to see what is done in their name. They do not want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins, the horribly maimed bodies and faces of veterans, or the human suffering in the blighted and deserted former manufacturing centers. It is too upsetting. Government and corporate censorship is therefore welcomed and appreciated. — Curtis White

It was cold, dark & lonely in the great cathedral-like chambers, with only coffins and corpses for company. — Billie-Jo Williams

Nor all that heralds rake from coffin'd clay, Nor florid prose, nor honied lies of rhyme, Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime. — Lord Byron

I will be in my coffin before I will fight again under your command. — Nathan Bedford Forrest

When people die they are sometimes put into coffins, which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots.
But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the creamatorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or snow somewhere. — Mark Haddon

When I'm laid in my coffin, I want you to put a picture of my grandchild to the right of me and and a picture of my daughter to my left. That way they will be buried with me. — Jeanne Calment

Birthdays were wretched, delicious things when you lived in Beau Rivage. The clock stuck midnight, and presents gave way to magic.
Curses bloomed.
Girls bit into sharp apples instead of birthday cake, chocked on the ruby-and-white slivers, and collapsed into enchanted sleep. Unconscious beneath cobweb canopies, frozen in coffins of glass, they waited for their princes to come. Or they tricked ogres, traded their voices for love, danced until their glass slippers cracked.
A prince would awaken, roused by the promise of true love, and find he had a witch to destroy. A heart to steal. To tear from the rib cage, where it was cushioned by bloody velvet, and deliver it to the queen who demanded the princess's death.
Girls became victims and heroines.
Boys became lovers and murderers.
And sometimes ... they became both. — Sarah Cross

Just throw me in my coffin now with these earrings on. — Rachel Zoe

He watched through a crack inside just pretending to be dead he wanted to fix each pallbearer in his memory ... it seems to me a telephone was installed in the coffin to someone yet again Stalin is sending his instructions. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

The coffins are really for us. The organization surpasses itself in that kind of thing. — Erich Maria Remarque

We stood in the graveyard, among the tombstones, forty-some dead people and me. A couple of my fellow funeral-goers had even been in their own coffins, deep under several feet of French soil. — Amy Plum

We are America.
We are the coffin fillers.
We are the grocers of death.
We pack them in crates like cauliflowers. — Anne Sexton

Simply adored Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope: the voice of Essie, the narrator, is terrific & the last line blew me away. — Nancy Pearl

Labels put people in boxes, and those boxes are shaped like coffins. — Chirlane McCray

Public depictions of women still tend to remain rigid and narrow - about the size of a coffin, say. — Joan Frank

The only thing I expect out of lawyers is that they be back in their coffins by sunup. — F. Ross Johnson

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down. — Margaret Atwood

When I have one foot in the grave, I will tell the whole truth about women. I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me and say, "Do what you like now." — Leo Tolstoy

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

New Orleans is 5 feet below sea level, which means that holes dug in the ground immediately fill with water. Coffins were punctured and sunk with weights, which didn't stop them from floating up out of the cemeteries and down the streets of the French Quarter on stormy nights. The solution was to bury people above ground, in what are called vaults. — James Cagney

I've lived here ... my whole life. It's where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they'll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident. — Jennifer McMahon

She sighed as she looked around. Tell you what I don't like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist . . . it's the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes - like coffins. The only way I can get rid of the boxes is to take a few drinks. Then all the lines get wavy and wiggly, and I feel a lot better about the whole world. When things are all straight and lined up this way I get morbid. Ugh! If I lived here I would have to stay drunk all the time. — Daniel Keyes

What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her? — Jonathan Safran Foer

A rut ... is little more than a coffin with the ends kicked out. — James Hunter

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can't get out of it on your own. — Tove Ditlevsen

It is my trade," he said. "I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black eye, and I put them in one of these tiny coffins. Beans, you know, are beautifully shaped, like a new church, like modern architecture, like a planned city — Janet Frame

When you notice light seeping into your coffin, it's hard to go on pretending that you're still dead. — John Burdett

Folks always look good in their coffins. — Elvis Presley

I remember eating in school in the years after the Second World War. Most of my friends had miserable portions of Spam with an inedible, glutinous pudding served in containers we called 'coffins.' As a vegetarian, I had a lump of loathsome cheese and some bread. — Robert Winston

Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid. — Alexander Smith

Dig deep, deep, my soul, to find the heart
the blood, the heat, the shrine and resting place. Dig deep, deep into the moist soil all the way to where they lie, those I love
she, Mother, with her dark hair loose and gone, her bones long since tumbled in the back of the vault, as other coffins came to rest in her spot, but in this dream I range them round me to hold as if she were there ... — Anne Rice

Well, I guess I am about the livest dead man you ever saw; although I was once asked to accept a coffin. — Dan Rice

The Sound of Building Coffins is a soulful work from a writer of the weird. Maistros does more than make you feel for his characters and their twisted, damaged lives; he makes you *want* to feel. — Paul G. Tremblay

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine. — Mem Fox

I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Even superheroes make mistakes, or they wouldn't have to be buried in handmade coffins in the sandbox. — Nora Roberts

My father died in France, and my sisters and I went over with my mum to bring back his body. I remember going to the funeral parlour in France and being given a laminated menu of coffins, and thinking, surely there is an ice cream at the back of here! — Rachel Joyce

Science itself is steadily nailing the lid on atheism's coffin. — Lee Strobel

Here's to new blood."
-Jagger Maxwell — Ellen Schreiber

shade of their ancestors' houses of bones; and their ancestors may return the favor of a visit: coffins sometimes float in the streets during bad floods. — Jimmy Fox

Three points for the dead slowly prising open the lids of their coffins. They want to hunt the living. They can't stop. Their throats have turned to liquid and their fingers glint under the weak autumn sun. — Jenny Downham

One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict. — Walter Dean Myers

She is not like me. She knows only the tree of life. She has not seen its twisted roots pawing stones and coffins. — Hannah Kent

Tell you what I don't like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist ... it's the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes - like coffins. The only way I can get rid of the boxes is to take a few drinks. Then all the lines get wavy and wiggly, and I feel a lot better about the whole world. When things are all straight and lined up this way I get morbid. — Daniel Keyes

Nobody leaves this band unless it's in a coffin — Billie Joe Armstrong

High above, the rafters were made of old wood, and sturdy as the mountain the house had been built on, and across the way, sixteen coffins were stacked one upon the next, as if they were nothing but moving boxes from U-Haul. The — J.R. Ward

Boggs comes a-tearing along on his horse, whooping and yelling like an Injun, and singing out: "Clear the track, thar. I'm on the waw-path, and the price uv coffins is a-gwyne to raise."
He was drunk, and weaving about in his saddle; he was over fifty year old, and had a very red face. Everybody yelled at him and laughed at him and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now because he'd come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat first and spoon vittles to top off on." He see me, and rode up and says:"Whar'd you come f'm boy? You prepared to die?" Then he rode on. I was scared, but a man says: "He don't mean nothing; he's always a-carryin' on like that when he's drunk. He's the best-naturedest old fool in Arkansaw
never hurt nobody, drunk no sober. — Mark Twain

Now hoppin'-john was F. Jasmine's very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john, and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead. — Carson McCullers

It's only in fairy tales that princesses can afford to wait for the handsome prince to save them. In real life, they have to bust out of their own coffins and do the saving themselves. — Meg Cabot

Private courts, Gloomy as coffins, and unsightly lanes Thrilled by some female vendor's scream, belike The very shrillest of all London cries, May then entangle our impatient steps; Conducted through those labyrinths, unawares, To privileged regions and inviolate, Where from their airy lodges studious lawyers Look out on waters, walks, and gardens green. — William Wordsworth

Shit rolls downhill. Bureaucracy rolls faster. — David Wellington

Our news bulletins were full of killings and death, so it was natural for Atal to think of coffins and graves. Instead of hide-and-seek and cops and robbers, children were now playing army vs. Taliban. — Malala Yousafzai

It's not the COUGH that carries you OFF ... It's the COFFIN they carry you OFF IN. — Steven Tyler

He coughs. Not a good sound. Too deep, too full of coffins.
Why is mankind so fucking cruel?
Why? — Sally Gardner

Grimaud left the chamber, and led the way to the hall, where, according
to the custom of the province, the body was laid out, previously to
being put away forever. D'Artagnan was struck at seeing two open coffins
in the hall. In reply to the mute invitation of Grimaud, he approached,
and saw in one of them Athos, still handsome in death, and, in the
other, Raoul with his eyes closed, his cheeks pearly as those of the
Palls of Virgil, with a smile on his violet lips. He shuddered at seeing
the father and son, those two departed souls, represented on earth by
two silent, melancholy bodies, incapable of touching each other, however
close they might be. — Alexandre Dumas

The only kind office performed for us by our friends of which we never complain is our funeral; and the only thing which we most want, happens to be the only thing we never purchase
our coffin. — Charles Caleb Colton

I get plenty of exercise carrying the coffins of my friends who exercise. — Red Skelton

I decided that it was like the difference between the beautiful old Godsend graves and the new ones open to receive coffins (which I never can bear to look at); that time takes the ugliness and horror out of death and turns it into beauty. — Dodie Smith