Mausoleum Quotes & Sayings

And it was this: raze to the ground the mausoleum you have just started building for the bones of your ancestors and your descendants and those who come in-between. Make that land a holy shrine for pilgrims from everywhere. — Kamila Shamsie

The Rival
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me. — Sylvia Plath

Fertility says, "Can you relax and just let things happen?"
I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen?
"And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment." She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything."
But you can be ready for disaster.
A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up.
"If you worry about disaster all of the time, that's what you are going to get," Fertility says. — Chuck Palahniuk

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire ... I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools. — William Faulkner

At first glance, she thought him a statue; an apparition in the deluge of rain. He sat perched on top of a mausoleum, crouched like a gargoyle with his elbows on his knees, hood shrouding his face. Three stone crosses rose behind him giving him the appearance a post-apocalyptic monk guarding a sacred shrine. That — Martina McAtee

Welcome, Bell said, not rising from a large wooden chair that had been placed in the center of the room like it was a throne. Would that make him the king of sewer rats? — Kalayna Price

She saw for the first time the way we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we've murdered the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in vases, a wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door
every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum. — Claire Vaye Watkins

When she awakened in the a.m. into blind-slit shrinking nowhereness, it had all gone disorientingly quiet, and she would imagine for a few seconds she was back there in that mausoleum of a ranch house in the San Fernando Valley. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Reading Myself
Like thousands I took just pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire
somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
and have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus ...
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work live long
enough for the sweet tooth bear to desecrate
this open book..my open coffin — Robert Lowell

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad. — Kingsley Amis

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. — Kingsley Amis

They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in. — Mark Twain

The computer beeped as the upload completed. A moment later, Ian Kabra appeared on the screen.
Dan was surprised. "Hey, Ian, isn't it, like, two in the morning back there?"
"It's called jet lag," Ian informed him. "I'm still on London time. I don't suppose you savages have any tea in this mausoleum."
"There's a diet Snapple in the fridge."
Ian shuddered. "I thought not. — Gordon Korman

But by the way, who is the murderer? The one who does not know my relatives, or myself, as I erect my new life like a fragile mausoleum where their shadowy figure is integrated, like a corpse, at the source of my wandering? — Julia Kristeva

Without electricity or gas, the kitchen became a twilight mausoleum of dead appliances. One day, Natasha had an idea. Wearing latex gloves she found in Sonja's room, she scrubbed the innards of the oven and refrigerator with steel wool and bleach. She cut a broomstick to the width of the refrigerator compartment, jammed it in below the thermostat control, and pulled out the plastic shelves. In her bedroom, she gathered clothes from the floor in sweeping armfuls and deposited them before the refrigerator and the oven. Ever since she had begun working for the shuttle trader, her wardrobe exceeded her closet space. She hung silk evening dresses and cashmere sweaters on the broomstick bar, set folded jeans and blouses on the oven rack. When finished, she opened the doors to her new closet and bureau and felt pleased with her ingenuity. This is how you will survive, she told herself. You will turn the holes in your life into storage space. — Anthony Marra

Mausoleum, n: the final and funniest folly of the rich. — Ambrose Bierce

Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness. — Leon Trotsky

I abide in a goodly Museum, Frequented by sages profound: 'Tis a kind of strange mausoleum, Where the beasts that have vanished abound. There's a bird of the ages Triassic, With his antediluvian beak, And many a reptile Jurassic, And many a monster antique. — May Kendall

Is it a mausoleum, and I, the Egyptiab, mummified with pillows and my own flesh, through some oversight enbalmed alive? There must be some mistake. — Margaret Laurence

If I were your mother, I would also warn you to beware of buildings that claim to be the houses of God. If heard it said once, jokingly, that on their days off, when they are not actively intervening in human affairs or shoring up the sweetness of the earth, the orishas get together in a little apartment in a poor section of Havana around a very big screen television and laugh themselves silly a the unceasing soap opera that is our lives, all the while puffing on good Cuban cigars and swigging cheap rum. And, darling, whether you imagine one big white distant god or many more particular brown ones who like their little pleasures, I would tell you to get off your butt and out of the house if you want to make contact. If you go to a mausoleum, you'll find dead bodies. Living gods inhabit a living world. — Joyce Thompson

Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space. — Richard Corliss

Readers transform a library from a mausoleum into many theaters. — Mason Cooley

As you wish, of course." Lucius lowered the volume on an old record player, which spun a warped vinyl disk that wailed unfamiliar music, scratchy and whiny, like cats fighting. Or a coffin with rusty hinges opening and closing over and over again in a deserted mausoleum. "Do you like Croatian folk?" heasked, seeing my interest. "It reminds me of home."
"I prefer normal music."
"Ah, yes, your MTV with all the bumping and grinding. Like a shot of raging adolescent hormones administered via television. I'm not averse. — Beth Fantaskey

Rome is one enormous mausoleum. There, the Past lies visibly stretched upon his bier. There is no today or tomorrow in Rome; it is perpetual yesterday. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all ... the Trump Taj Mahal. For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions along the boardwalk.- It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly. — Stephen Fry

Farewell best beloved, here at last I shall rest with thee, with thee in Christ I shall rise again'.(written on Prince Albert's and Queen Victorias's mausoleum) — Victoria Magazine

Now that I'm thinking about it," I told Gerald, "they could make an incredibly long limousine that had it's back seat at your mom's VJ and it's front seat at your mausoleum, and it would be as long as your life. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Nothing is more interesting than repressed emotion. The appearance of sardonic coldness and stoicism which has deceived you is but a hollow mockery; beneath it I secrete a maelstrom of impassioned feeling and a mausoleum of blighted hopes. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum! — Jonathan Safran Foer

Permanence has been swept aside by the rapidity of empty images. The pantheon, we discover to our astonishment, is the doghouse of the burning asylum ... We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it's a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk. — Roberto Bolano

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. — Herbert Marcuse

Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women. — V.S. Pritchett

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. — Lee Siegel

A silent concave of puppet buffoons
neither eagles nor jaguars
buzzard lawyers
locuses
wings of ink sawing mindibles
ventriloquist coyotes
peddlers of shadows
beneficent satraps
the cacomistle thief of hens
the monument to the Rattle and its snake
the altar to the mauser and the machete
the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman
rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement — Octavio Paz

Before I came to New York I lived here, in this mausoleum. I was nothing. I was dead. When I came to New York it was like a veil lifting. For the first time I felt I was alive, breathing. — Jacqueline Susann

If you worry about disaster all the time, that's what you're going to get. — Chuck Palahniuk

What had those vile creatures unleashed in me? What beast had they awakened? I think I vowed to kill the beast and bury it so deep in the abyss it would never again rear its ugly head. Part of me did make this promise. The other part embraced an unfolding of life's inextinguishable flames and the mind's unspoken bondage.
As far as reinforcing the strength of my mind's resolve, I supposed my body was a useless entity. Rather, it was this fancy thing I lived in - a mausoleum that beckoned the living, promising gratification, refuge, solace, peace, even immortality. It wasn't me. It wasn't mine. I realized then, it had never belonged to me. I could control what happened to it only if people were merciful. Watching Valentin was not merciful. It was a torturous joy. — Kyrian Lyndon

The gravedigger knew a fine trick. When the worms looked unhappy he would leave his place in the mausoleum and go up into the sunshine. He would go empty-handed, but when he returned, with him came a most exquisite corpse. The worms would rejoice, and they would feast upon the corpse until they were fat and could feast no more. The young would come with the old to see this trick and glory in it. No worm knew where the gravedigger got his corpses, but they were always succulent and nourishing. They praised the gravedigger's generosity. -- From "Worms — L. Joseph Shosty

Superstition, as indigenous to Louisiana as gators and Tabasco, holds that the spirits of the dead avenge any disruption of their bodies, which makes one wonder at the rancor released on the 1957 day when fifty-five white families re-interred their beloved in Hope Mausoleum after the Rt. Rev. Girault M. Jones, Bishop of Louisiana, deconsecrated the Girod Street Cemetery, condemning every last African American bone to anonymity in a mass grave in Providence Memorial Park. From that pogrom grew the Superdome. Thirteen acres of structural steel framing stretch up to 273 feet from the unholy ground, a towering testament to the American propensity to cheer black men into the end zones and desert them entirely six points later. — Ellen Urbani

We object not to the narration of the deeds of our unregenerate condition, but to the mode in which it is too often done. Let sin have its monument, but let it be a heap of stones cast by the hands of execration - not a mausoleum erected by the hands of affection. — Charles Spurgeon

She raised the shovel, ready to plunge it into the soft soil. "I am not afraid. I am not."
"You should be." A sinister, accented voice pierced her consciousness.
The shovel fell from her nerveless fingers, thudding onto the cold ground.
Cassandra knew that voice; it had the rich, dark cadence that had haunted her dreams since the night she'd first met him. She spun around, the hood of her cloak falling to her shoulders.
Rafael Villar stepped out from behind a mausoleum. The shadows embraced his bronze skin, obscuring the scars on the left side of his face while moonlight highlighted his exotic Mediterranean features on the right....
"You! You've been the one disturbing my people? — Brooklyn Ann

Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses. — John Simon