Funeral Death Quotes & Sayings

I remembered back to leo's burial and holding your hand. I was eleven and you were six, your hand soft and small in mine. As the vicar said 'in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of eternal life' you turned to me, 'I don't want sure and certain hope I want sure and certain Bee. — Rosamund Lupton

It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain. — Barbara Taylor Bradford

Whenever I start thinking about death, it always cheers me up to think about my funeral and my tombstone (which, by the way, will say "Here lies Harlan Sturr. Please don't pee on him.") — Adam Selzer

Visit me before I die. We can enjoy one another's company. A funeral is a rather one-sided affair. — Ralph Webster

A comedy ends with a wedding, and a tragedy ends with a funeral: you always have to juxtapose sex and death. — Chuck Palahniuk

A recent survey stated that the average person's greatest fear is having to give a speech in public. Somehow this ranked even higher than death which was third on the list. So, you're telling me that at a funeral, most people would rather be the guy in the coffin than have to stand up and give a eulogy. — Jerry Seinfeld

What's the point?" her father muttered brokenly the day of the funeral. In the last months his shoulders had curled like an autumn leaf.
"The point is that we're not alive unless we also die," Louise said. — Danika Stone

Nothing good comes from a death without a funeral. — Kate Morton

All things that we ordained festival,
Turn from their office to black funeral;
Our instruments to melancholy bells,
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast,
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change,
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,
And all things change them to the contrary. — William Shakespeare

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

Man should ever look to his last day, and no one should be called happy before his funeral.
[Lat., Ultima semper
Expectanda dies homini est, dicique beatus
Ante obitum nemo et suprema funera debet.] — Ovid

He took a deep breath in, still managing himself as if he were resisting temptation. He was a soldier, his father was in the service, too. Crying wasn't something Morell men did. They just didn't.

He hadn't cried at Robbie Morell's funeral.

So he wasn't going to now. — Luke Taylor

I can't think of a more wonderful thanksgiving for the life I have had than that everyone should be jolly at my funeral — Lord Mountbatten

It was when I discovered that there are two kinds of death. There is ceasing to exist, usually accompanied by a funeral and loved ones in mourning. And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive. — Kerry Kletter

You know all my life I've hated funerals. The fuss and bother never brings anybody back. It just spoils remembering them as they really are. And when I see people actually facing it that way, I have to act like a sap. — Jules Furthman

A Parting Guest
What delightful hosts are they
Life and Love!
Lingeringly I turn away,
This late hour, yet glad enough
They have not withheld from me
Their high hospitality.
So, with face lit with delight
And all gratitude, I stay
Yet to press their hands and say,
Thanks. - So fine a time! Good night. — James Whitcomb Riley

I'll see you at your funeral, if you'll see me at mine. I'll wait at the edges for your ghost to rise (until the end of time). We'll find someplace nice to haunt, an abandoned beach house filled with memories of summer sunburns. Children will giggle as we tickle their feet at night and they'll never know the bad dreams we fight. We'll make our own heaven. Walking in places we used to walk until death, dies. — Pleasefindthis

Christ never preached any funeral sermons. — Dwight L. Moody

Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping. — Cormac McCarthy

Burials in Cahokia could be astonishingly elaborate. In one, a man was buried on a bed of twenty thousand beads of shell. Nearby three people were buried at teh same time along with eight hundred arrowheads and a host of other objects. These were probably close relatives, sacrifieced at the death of the great man. Also nearby, more than fifty women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three were interred, evidently strangled as part of a funeral ceremony. — Jake Page

Conner hadn't liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he'd learned from his grandmother's funeral that you have to go. It's expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief - a little or a lot - is tucked into your pocket and carried away. — Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson

Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now. She will never suffer more in this world. She is gone after a hard, short conflict ... Yes there is no Emily in time or on earth now. Yesterday we put her poor, wasted, mortal frame quietly under the chancel pavement. We are very calm at present. Why shoud we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to trouble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them. — Charlotte Bronte

According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy. — Jerry Seinfeld

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. — W. H. Auden

The falseness of the seventeenth century became a large measure of the truth by the nineteenth. Money made the man, or at least went a long way toward doing so; and death became the occasion for a final accounting, a stocktaking of worldly success. Of course, there were other metrics: virtue, martyrdom, political standing, fraternal ties. But it took money to publicize them. The funeral became more and more a standardized commodity whose cost could be matched with exquisite precision to the class and degree of 'respectability' of the deceased. When one bought a funeral, one bought a more or less splendid parade, each additional bauble, each horse, each feather or set of nails adding to the base price. Bit by bit, finery accumulated, and by looking at the account books of an undertaker who specialized in pauper funerals, we can begin to see the bounds of decency in death. — Thomas W. Laqueur

Ginny, listen ... I can't be involved with you anymore. We've got to stop seeing each other. We can't be together."
"It's for some stupid noble reason isn't it?"
"It's been like ... like something out of someone else's life these last few weeks with you. But I can't ... we can't ... I've got to do things alone now. Voldemort uses people his enemies are close to. He's already used you as bait once, and that was just because you were my best friend's sister. Think how much danger you'll be in if we keep this up. He'll know, he'll find out. He'll try and get me through you."
"What if I don't care?"
"I care. How do you think I'd feel if this was your funeral ... and it was my fault ... — J.K. Rowling

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

Tiffany had watched the dead before many times, of course - it was the custom for a departing soul to have company the night before any funeral or burial, as if to make a point to anything that might be ... lurking: this person mattered, there is someone here to make sure nothing evil creeps in at this time of danger. — Terry Pratchett

To hear how much of a great human being you were - even if you really weren't - open your ears at your funeral. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

A funeral is like a little game, really. You have to just play along and say the right thing and behave the right way until it's over. Be pleasant but don't smile too much; be sad but don't overdo it or the family will feel worse than they already do. Be hopeful but don't let your optimism be taken as a lack of empathy or an inability to deal with the reality. Because if anybody was to be truly honest there would be a lot of arguments, finger-pointing, tears, snot, and screaming. — Cecelia Ahern

When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody. — J.D. Salinger

We may all host ourselves to death, and if we're all dead who will host our funerals? — Amy Poehler

Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new. On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid. To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold's funeral,t hat death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, we still make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Ah, much deluded! lay aside
Thy threats, and anger misapplied!
Art not afraid with sounds like these
To offend, where thou canst not appease?
Death is not (wherefore dream'st thou thus?)
The son of night and Erebus:
Not was of fell Erynnis born
On gulfs where Chaos rules forlorn.
But sent from God, his presence leaves,
To gather home his ripen'd sheaves,
To call encumber'd souls away
From fleshly bonds to boundless day,
(As when the winged hours excited,
And summon forth the morning light)
And each to convoy to her place
Before the Eternal Father's face. — John Milton

*Paying one's last respects* is about the payer, not the paid. (Who attends the funeral - and who doesn't - is the deceased's last worry.) — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A funeral is no place for secrets. — Mitch Albom

Black funeral dress. Black heels. Black headband in my hair. Death has a style all it's own. I'm glad I don't have to wear it very often. — Courtney C. Stevens

Anyway, they took her body to McBurney's Funeral Home in Motley. They'll be planting her tomorrow. — Peter Hedges

As a business, the funeral industry has developed by selling a certain type of "dignity." Dignity is having a well-orchestrated final moment for the family, complete with a well-orchestrated corpse. Funeral directors become like directors for the stage, curating the evening's performance. The corpse is the star of the show and pains are taken to make sure the fourth wall is never broken, that the corpse does not interact with the audience and spoil the illusion. — Caitlin Doughty

The purpose of a funeral service is to comfort the living. It is important at a funeral to display excessive grief. This will show others how kind-hearted and loving you are and their improved opinion of you will be very comforting. — P. J. O'Rourke

Michael O'Sullivan was my great friend. But I don't ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. — Ian Bannen

For 3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person. (on Margaret Thatcher) — Frankie Boyle

You broke me bodily.
The heart ain't the half of it,
And I'll never learn to laugh at it
In my good natured way.
In fact, I'm laughing less in general,
But I learned a lot at my own funeral.
And I knew you'd be the death of me,
So I guess that's the price I pay. — Ani DiFranco

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

My situation is a solemn one: life is offered to me on the condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed, not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures. It will be, without the exception of Noah's Ark, the most remarkable thing of its kind ever seen. — George Bernard Shaw

Our birthday is celebrated every year to commemorate the very first instant we came into the world, and a funeral is held to mark the day we leave it. But lately I've been wondering ... what can be said of all the moments in between our birth and our death? The moments when we are reborn ... — Taylor Swift

You are despicable and such cowards that you won't even share your dead bodies with the Earth, but put them inside wooden and metal coffins to "protect" them. From what? — Carl Abrahamsson

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

I wish to declare with all earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in such ceremonies, and to submit to them, even as a matter of form, would be hypocrisy and an attempt to delude ourselves and others. — Jawaharlal Nehru

Following directly behind the bier were the servants who would, in earlier times, have been slaughtered at the graveside, along with a warrior's horse. Musicians and torchbearers came next, with the rear taken up by the mimes- sinister, silent figures in wax masks modelled on dead members of the family. — Catharine Arnold

In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death. — Albert Camus

Man's last day must ever be awaited and none to be
counted happy until his death, until his last funeral rites
are paid. — Ovid

Then she wound up the clock. Witches didn't have much use for clocks, but she kept it for the tick ... well, mainly for the tick. It made a place seem lived in. It had belonged to her mother, who'd wound it up every day. It hadn't come as a surprise to her when her mother died, firstly because Esme Weatherwax was a witch and witches have an insight into the future and secondly because she was already pretty experienced in medicine and knew the signs. So she'd had a chance to prepare herself, and hadn't cried at all until the day afterward, when the clock stopped right in the middle of the funeral lunch. She'd dropped a tray of ham rolls and then had to go and sit by herself in the privy for a while, so that no one would see. — Terry Pratchett

There is a sort of melancholy pleasure to be had out of a funeral, with its pomp and ceremony, but I shrank from a death-bed. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

Had he been willing to live a hypocrite, he would have been respectable, he at least could have died surrounded by other hypocrites, and at his death there would have been an imposing funeral, with miles of carriages, filled with hypocrites, and above his hypocritical dust there would have been a hypocritical monument covered with lies. — Robert Green Ingersoll

October is nature's funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming - October than May. Every green thin loves to die in bright colors. — Henry Ward Beecher

When, with a smile, she let the dirt slip slowly across her curled palm and out the side of her hand onto the coffin, the gesture looked like the prelude to a carnal act. Clearly this was a man to whom she'd once given much thought. — Philip Roth

We live to produce information, or improve on it. Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri - either children or books, both information that caries through the centuries ... I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books, - my information, that is, my genes, the anti-fragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me. Then say goodbye, have a nice funeral in St. Sergius (Mar Sarkis) in Amioun, and, as the French say, place aux autres - make room for others (p. 370-371). — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If I must die young, bury me
in a music box. I'll be the pale ballerina with dirt
in her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs
and open the lid when you visit.

Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling
the dark night's belly until I'm dizzy, until the stars
melt and spiral into a halo over my head
and I've stirred my death into the sky. — Jalina Mhyana

Death is a personal matter, arousing sorrow, despair, fervor, or dry-hearted philosophy. Funerals, on the other hand, are social functions. Imagine going to a funeral without first polishing the automobile. Imagine standing at a graveside not dressed in your best dark suit and your best black shoes, polished delightfully. Imagine sending flowers to a funeral with no attached card to prove you had done the correct thing. In no social institution is the codified ritual of behavior more rigid than in funerals. Imagine the indignation if the minister altered his sermon or experimented with facial expression. Consider the shock if, at the funeral parlors, any chairs were used but those little folding yellow torture chairs with the hard seats. No, dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration. — John Steinbeck

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries. — Christopher Hitchens

The fear of death haunted me for a year. I cried whenever anyone dropped a glass or broke a picture. But even then that passed, I was left with a sadness that couldn't be rubbed off. It wasn't that something had happened. It was worse: I'd become aware of what had been with me all along without my notice. I dragged this new awareness around like a stone tied to my ankle. Wherever I went, it followed. I used to make up little sad songs in my head. I eulogized the falling leaves. I imagined my death in a hundred different ways, but the funeral was always the same: from somewhere in my imagination, out rolled a red carpet. Because after every secret death I died, my greatness was always discovered. — Nicole Krauss

So die as though your funeral
Ushered you through the doors that led
Into a stately banquet hall
Where heroes banqueted. — Alan Seeger

A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, and committal read. But somehow the corpse never stays put. — Bernard Ramm

I am so sorry to hear of Asher's passing. I will miss his scientific insight and advice, but even more his humor and stubborn integrity. I remember when one of his colleagues complained about Asher's always rejecting his manuscript when they were sent to him to referee. Asher said in effect, 'You should thank me. I am only trying to protect your reputation.' He often pretended to consult me, a fellow atheist, on matters of religious protocol.

{Charles H. Bennett's letter written to the family of Israeli physicist, Asher Peres} — Charles H. Bennett

Colt was pleased they'd chosen a closed casket. It was an occupational hazard that he'd seen more death than most and it was never pretty. Dead, was dead, it was unattractive, no matter who did the makeup or what outfit you chose and how much satin lined the casket. Colt thought viewing a dead body at a funeral home was one last but forced, indignity and he hated it. — Kristen Ashley

People are usually pretty hungry after a funeral. I guess it's because we all realize that time is running out and we better eat all we can. Please don't mention that to my mother. — Peter Hedges

I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case. — John Knowles

From life to life, from breath to breath, we remember Elinor. — Malinda Lo

The Bible is not a script for a funeral service, but it is the record of God always bringing life where we expected to find death. Everywhere it is the story of resurrection. — Eugene H. Peterson

We always emerge from the death of a loved one like a phoenix arising from its funeral pyre. — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should?
"It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.
"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
"It is why we are drawn to babies ... " He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals. — Mitch Albom

I hadn't understood funeral pyres before, but now I do. It's ghastly to burn someone you love but watching the smoke going into the sky, I think that's rather beautiful now. And I wish Tess could be up in the sky. Somewhere with color and light and air. — Rosamund Lupton

Funerals aren't for the dead. They're for the living. — Gavin Extence

It had been a beautiful day for an outdoor ceremony, with the kind of lucid weather she hoped to have at her own funeral. She thought often of her own death, but without fear, loss having been her only belonging in this life. For years, acceptance had been her only means of survival. She knew that no matter how miserable or wretched life became, all she could do with her meek piece of time was sustain it. Decades of guilt, lost faith, the betrayal by those few people she'd let herself love - it was worth enduring these things, if only for the gift of a single, exalted moment. And such moments happened, even frequently, in the lives of people wise enough to see them. — Esi Edugyan

How quickly, how neatly the chaos of a living person could be reduced to an insignificant box. — Josh Lanyon

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live. — Neil Gaiman

Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding. — Robyn Schneider

According to the Talmud, if a funeral procession and a wedding procession cross paths, the wedding party goes first. Life is more important than death. — Anita Diamant

They went Indian file. First came the scouts, clever, graceful, quiet. They had rifles. Next came the antitank gunner, clumsy and dense, warning Germans away with a Colt .45 automatic in one hand and a trench knife in the other.
Last came Billy Pilgrim, empty-handed, bleakly ready for death. Billy was preposterous - six feet and three inches tall, with a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches. He had no helmet, no overcoat, no weapon, and no boots. On his feet were cheap, low-cut civilian shoes which he had bought for his father's funeral. Billy had lost a heel, which made him bob up-and-down, up-and-down. The involuntary dancing, up-and-down, up-and-down, made his hip joints sore. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. — Kurt Vonnegut

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset? — Daniele Vare

Wouldst thou find my ashes? Look
In the pages of my book;
And as these thy hand doth turn,
Know here is my funeral urn. — Adelaide Crapsey

Once, when I was little, I asked her if she'd cried when my father had fallen to his death.
At the funeral? I mean, the burial?
No, I did not.
Because you weren't sad?
Because it was nobody's business if I was. — Khaled Hosseini

But he said to his wife, sitting next to him on the couch in the TV room, that rarely had he seen a funeral at which it seemed like almost nobody in attendance had any idea why they were there. His wife, who had heard things like this from him before, reminded him of a ceremony he had presided over only a few months ago about which he had had the same reaction. 'Oh right,' the minister said. 'Yes. That one was much worse.' He leaned down to the coffee table and picked up the remote. — Mark Wallace

Few occasions are as joyous to small children as funerals, almost better than the big wedding blowouts that take place at night when it's hard to stay awake. A small boy will never be harshly criticized at a funeral; he is more treasured as death comes close and all his wickedness vanishes before the inescapable fact that thank God, he is healthy. — Arthur Miller

Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death. — Thomas Bernhard

I think you should live your life so that the maximum number of people will attend your funeral. — Scott Adams

Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved. — Timothy Schaffert

Charlie started crying, in the convulsive, soundless way that men do. "Don't you understand," he said after composing himself, "that's a funeral dirge for the first wave." We all thought about that, the many lives lost before we even opened our eyes this morning. — Suzanne Hayes

What do you think of when you think of mourning?' Jenny asks.
The question snaps me back to attention. I answer without really thinking. "I guess 'Funeral Blues' by W.H. Auden. I think it was Auden. I suppose that's not very original.'
'I don't know it.'
'It's a poem.'
'I gathered.'
'I'm just clarifying. It's not a blues album.'
Jenny ignores my swipe at her intelligence.
'Does your response need to be original? Isn't that what poetry is for, for the poet to express something so personal that it ultimately is universal?'
I shrug. Who is Jenny, even new Jenny, to say what poetry is for? Who am I for that matter?
'Why do you thin of that poem in particular?'
"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, / Silence the pianos and with muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.'
I learned the poem in college and it stuck. — Steven Rowley

I want them to play Britney Spears at my funeral. This way I won't feel so bad about being dead, and everyone there will know there is something worse than Death. — Gary Numan

I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head.
And there is no hurry about it;
I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,
Seeing that long standing increases all things
regardless of quality. — Ezra Pound

I narrate the story but he dies off-stage between commercials. A washing machine ad later, we are dressed in our funereal best. We sniffle and indulge in product placement for Kleenex. The credits roll. — Thomm Quackenbush

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

The moment one is born, the 'saw starts cutting'. People consider it as death only when the wood breaks in two pieces [during funeral]. But it was being cut from the very beginning. — Dada Bhagwan

I want words at my funeral. But I guess that means you need life in your life. — Markus Zusak