Quotes & Sayings About Cremation

Some in Westminster have talked about her receiving a state funeral when she dies, which seems a bizarre sort of tribute to someone who believed the state should do as little as possible. It would be far more appropriate to allow competitive bids from private companies to run the funeral arrangements. 'And we now go over live to Westminster, where state leaders are lining up for Lady Thatcher's funeral sponsored by McDonald's. And there we see the coffin respectfully borne on the shoulders of six part-time burger-flippers dressed in the official Ronald McDonald costume, before the private cremation when the body will be flame-grilled with gherkins and a slice of cheese.'
It's what she would have wanted. — John O'Farrell

More than a hygienic method of disposing of the dead, cremation enabled lovers and comrades to be mingled together for eternity: — Catharine Arnold

When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They're all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism - burial, cremation, anatomical gift-giving, water reduction, ecological funeral - to bring it to the point of acceptance. — Mary Roach

One of the great advantages of cremation - apart from all sanitary conditions - lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the material elements composing the physical and astral corpses, brought about by the burning. — Annie Besant

I think you should automatically donate your organs because that would turn the balance of organ donation in a huge way. I would donate whatever anybody would take, and I'd probably do the cremation bit. — George Clooney

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

I don't want to spend a fortune on my cremation urn, but I really do want to look nice at my memorial service. — Lynn Flewelling

Cremation has become the most popular form of burial in the United States ... People used to want a big, thick granite stone, their names carved into with a chisel. I was here dammit! Cremation is like you're trying to cover up a crime. Burn the body. Scatter the ashes around. As far as anyone's concerned this whole thing never happened. — Jerry Seinfeld

by the late second and first centuries BC, across southern Britain, certain members of society enjoy well-equipped inhumation and cremation burial, the males usually distinguished by swords, the females by mirrors. — Barry W. Cunliffe

Wouldn't be very fair to the rest of them, would it?" Harper asked. "They're not bad people, most of them. All they want is to be safe."
"Isn't that always a permission slip for ugliness and cruelty? All they want is to be safe, and they don't care who they have to destroy to stay that way. And the people who want to kill us, the Cremation Crews, all they want is safety, too! — Joe Hill

Cremation was definitely the way to go. It was the way I wanted to go, rather than risk the possibility of going out on a bad-hair day. — Emily Giffin

More than a hygenic method of disposing of the dead, cremation enabled lovers and comrades to be mingled together for eternity:
The ashes of Domitian were mingled with those of Julia; of Achilles with those of Patroclus; All Urnes contained not single ashes; Without confused burnings they affectionately compounded their bones; passionately endeavouring to continue their living Unions. And when distance of death denied such conjunctions, unsatisfied affections concieved some satisfaction to be neighbours in the grave, to lye Urne by Urne, and touch but in their names. — Catharine Arnold

Little kids' minds are very, very strong. They bend. There's a lot of tensile strength and they don't break. We start our kids off on things like "Hansel and Gretel," which features child abbandonment, kidnapping, attempted murder, forcible detention, cannibalism, and finally murder by cremation. And the kids love it. — Stephen King

This was not just any urn. It was a cremation urn, housing the powdered remains of Mrs. Pule's mother Wanda, a woman so mean and nasty that she had it put in writing that upon her death she wished to be cremated and have her ashes scattered over people who had annoyed her. — Gerry Swallow

Never. Till my last breath I will work. To retire there is only one place-the cremation ground. — Dhirubhai Ambani

I am preparing myself for death. When I go to sleep, I try to keep myself smiling. So that when I die, I have a smile on my lips. I want an electric cremation. I don't want any poems or fuss after that. And for heaven's sake, don't bring back my ashes. Flush them down the toilet if the crematorium refuses to keep them. If they tell you that I am dead, I want you to give a big laugh. — Zohra Sehgal

When you are sad or in pain or sick or you witness any cremation then you actually learn the many truths of life. — Neem Karoli Baba

He looked at her face and hesitated. He looked up at the canyon walls. Here on the sandbar, it was eerily quiet except for the tinkle of water over the rocks. A large bird made lazy soaring circles way up in the sky, almost invisible due to the angle of the sun. God forgive me, he thought. Then he touched Ranjit's lighter to the small sheaf of dried grass and threw it on the pyre. He was surprised at the flash when it caught fire. It wouldn't be long, he thought. I will move on, but I will never forget this place.
(from The Sacrament of the Goddess) — Joe Niemczura

CREMATION OF THE BODY IS FINAL. - SIGN IN FUNERAL HOME — Darynda Jones

Most people are not really scared of death. They are merely terrified of being taken to a mortuary and/or being buried or cremated and/or being forgotten. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Rita could find fault with a twenty-one-gun salute in her honor. "Too noisy," she'd complain. "All that gun powdah makes me cough." Bernice, on the other hand, was overjoyed when a salesman from the cremation place informed her that her ashes would weigh about six pounds. "Thin at last!" she shrieked. — Jennifer Coburn

Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience, Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body's receiving an occasional beating - which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation. — Thomas Mann

Long hours of working barefoot in the pans saturates their legs so much with salt that these farmers cannot even have a satisfactory cremation after death because their lower limbs do not burn. It is a miserable existence. — Verghese Kurien

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

The world is running out of good places for ashes.
The Jade Rabbit — Mark Matthews

One first celebrates a 'silver jubilee', then a 'golden jubilee', then a 'diamond jubilee', but even then he goes back again into a pile of wood (cremation). — Dada Bhagwan

Uncle Henry can call cremation pagan if he wants to, but this open-coffin shit is the real pagan rite. She doesn't look like my mother, she looks like a stuffed rabbit. — Stephen King

The terrors of the future will not come from the drab repressions of an encroaching bureaucracy, but from the neon lights of a thousand supermarkets, the sounds of a million automobile accidents and from the public cremation of the dead astronauts as they return to earth. — Christopher Riche Evans

If I hadn't decided on cremation and a scattering, I could have used the phrase as an epitaph on a chunk of stone or marble: "Tony Webster - He Never Got It." But that would be too melodramatic, even self-pitying. How about "He's on His Own Now"? That would be better, truer. Or maybe I'll stick with: "Every Day Is Sunday. — Julian Barnes

purification in fire. public cremation — Janet Fitch

And do you know the story about Haydn's head? They cut it away from the still-warm cadaver so some insane scientist could take apart the brain and pinpoint the location of musical genius. And the Einstein Story? He'd carefully written his will with instructions to cremate him. They followed his orders, but his disciple, ever loyal and devoted, refused to live without the master's gaze on him. Before the cremation, he took the eyes of the cadaver and put them in a bottle of alcohol to keep them watching him until the moment he should die himself. That's why I said that the crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It's the only absolute death. And I don't want any other. Jean-Marc, I want an absolute death. — Milan Kundera

Handling a dead body is not a repugnant or frightening experience and, somehow, it helps to accept the fact that the soul of that person has gone if you treat the body with reverence and respect before it is finally disposed of by cremation or burial. — Jennifer Worth

He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable. — Kim Edwards

At night I sometimes see the figure of a man, on an empty road in a deserted landscape, walking behind a hearse. I am that man. It's you the hearse is taking away. I don't want to be there for your cremation; I don't want to be given an urn with your ashes in it. I hear the voice of Kathleen Ferrier singing, 'Die Welt ist leer, Ich will nicht leben mehr'* and I wake up. I check your breathing, my hand brushed over you. Neither of us wants to outlive the other. We've often said to ourselves that if, by some miracle, we were to have a second life, we'd like to spend it together.
*The world is empty. I don't want to go on living. — Andre Gorz

The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation. There is no limit to where our engagement with death can take us. — Caitlin Doughty

I have decided that when I'm dead I'd like my body in the woods under a light coating of leaves. That being against the law, maybe I will go for cremation. I ask Chuck what he wants done with his remains. "Remains?" says Chuck. "Do there have to be remains? Can't I just vanish? Be no more?" I tell him I'm sorry but yes, he has to have remains. "Either I'm too young to be thinking about this," he says, "or I have to figure out a way of offing myself that will leave no remains. I could get in the shower with a chain saw, — Abigail Thomas

The struggle for a life extracts all our attention, and leaves us blind, deaf, dumb and senseless. The writer, the artist, the musician vanishes, without even the charity of a proper cremation. At this point words become formless sounds, and thoughts run out of paper and jump out of the terra firma and fly in the air, forcing us to find someone to share them with, someone who could understand. The fear of wasting words is the worst kind of it, only a writer knows. — Anu Lal

Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it,' he told Ruth.
'What, cremation?' she asked.
'Death. — Anne Tyler

We can do a cremation here, at the house?" I ask.
"We built a fire," my father says.
"Obviously. And I put the whole cat in the fire?"
"There isn't a whole cat," my mother says.
"What is there?"
"Parts of cat," they say together.
"Bones?" I ask.
"Mostly. And some fur. And some face. — Ramona Ausubel

I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to make nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the fist time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama's cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one's dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead. — Joseph O'Neill

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

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

Every single living thing is food to at least one living thing. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana