The Gravedigger Quotes & Sayings

Like most people, I was not able to start selling my stories right away. So I had many other jobs along the way to becoming a writer, including toy maker, gravedigger, cookware salesman, and assembly line worker. Eventually, I became an elementary teacher and worked with second and fourth graders. — Bruce Coville

We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others. In my drama, perhaps, I am Hamlet or Iago or at least the swineherd who may yet become a prince, but to you I am only A Gentleman or at best Second Murderer, while you are my Polonius or my Gravedigger, but your own hero. Each of our dramas exerts constraints on each other's, making the whole different from the parts, but still dramatic. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Here lies the girl whose only crutch
Was loving one man just a little too much
If you go before I do
I'm gonna tell the gravedigger that he better dig two. — The Band Perry

Who was this girl alone so late at night
in search of a faded cassette illusion to disembowel the clocks of time's intrusion? Those eyes belonged to the most beautiful maniac I've ever met. Our love is a vine of entrails that can follow any coffin anywhere, no matter how deep any gravedigger might travel. — Nicholaus Patnaude

I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin - as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place. — Michael Ondaatje

I got into this thing called the National Youth Theatre, and to me, that was all about the status quo. It seemed to me like 'Downton Abbey' - all the working-class and black people were playing servants, or the gravedigger in 'Hamlet,' and the boys from Eton and posh private schools got Hamlet, all the big roles. — DeObia Oparei

Lucivar winced. "She guzzled half the flask - and it wasn't one of his home brews, it was the concoction you created."

Jaenelle's eyes widened. "You let her drink a 'gravedigger'?"

"No no no," Wilhelmina said, shaking her head. "You shouldn't ever drink a gravedigger until he's had a bath." She smiled placidly when Jaenelle and Lucivar just stared at her.

"Mother Night," Lucivar muttered.

"Do you know that song?" Wilhelmina asked Jaenelle. — Anne Bishop

Our lives are God's messengers beneath the stars. — Sri Aurobindo

It had been my idea that a combination of purebred cattle and horses could be successful from an economic standpoint - in Maryland. Maryland is not a cattle state. To raise beef cattle successfully, you've got to be able to raise cheap feed. — Larry MacPhail

The gravedigger's work is charming when done by a child. — Victor Hugo

Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin ... We cannot rightly acknowledge the gifts of God unless we acknowledge the Mediator for whose sake alone they are given to us. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Aw, they're all cuddly. It's like watching grizzlies mate.
Ash from The Gravedigger's Brawl — Abigail Roux

Every meal I eat, I be like, 'Can I get some orange juice?' — Slim Jimmy

People love to hate the gravedigger. — Kathy Reichs

I'm the basketball version of a gravedigger. — Dennis Rodman

I work at the graveyard. It's a family business passed down to me. I seem to be the last in line, however. But I don't plan to stop. I forget to stop and just keep going. Work to be done. Always something to do. I've been working here for hundreds of years. Burying more and more. It's a family business. — K.C. Green

No sooner was I safely among the gravestones than a great feeling of warmth and calm contentment came sweeping over me.
Life among the dead.
This was where I was meant to be!
What a revelation! And what a place to have it!
I could succeed at whatever I chose. I could, for instance, become an undertaker. Or a pathologist. A detective, a gravedigger, a tombstone maker, or even the world's greatest murderer.
Suddenly the world was my oyster
even if it was a dead one. — Alan Bradley

That's what a story must feel like to me. It's not, "I want to write about a gravedigger." But you're walking along and - boop! shovel. "Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don't know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body." — George Saunders

There's a country spread out in the sky, a credulous carpet of rainbows and crepuscular plants: I move toward it just a bit haggardly, trampling a gravedigger's rubble still moist from the spade to dream in a bedlam of vegetables. — Pablo Neruda

When it comes to current attitudes about surgery, the practice of dismissing the cultural context and rationalizing it as individual betterment "flattens the terrain of power relations." In other words, we can talk about doing it for us until our high-end lipstick flakes off, but we should also keep in mind that we probably wouldn't even be thinking about what life would be like with a new nose or perkier breasts or shapelier inner thighs if it weren't for a long-standing cultural ideal that rewards those who adhere to it with power that often doesn't speak its name, but is instantly recognizable to those who don't have it. — Andi Zeisler

That eminence of learning is not to be gained without labour, at least equal to that which any other kind of greatness can require, will be allowed by those who wish to elevate the character of a scholar; since they cannot but know that every human acquisition is valuable in proportion to the difficulty of its attainment. — Samuel Johnson

I keep lot of my opinions to myself. My grandfather, who was a gravedigger, told me one day, 'Son, the next time you go by the cemetery, remember that a third of the people are in there because they got into other people's business.' — Lee Trevino

In my 33rd year, I was called to play Jesus. — Jim Caviezel

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

The popular notion that ghosts are likely to be seen in a graveyard is not borne out by psychical research ... A haunting ghost usually haunts a place that a person lived in or frequented while alive ... Only a gravedigger's ghost would be likely to haunt a graveyard. — John H. Alexander

She began to study with a teacher of teachers, whom they brought for that purpose from the city of Mompox, and who died unexpectedly two weeks later, and she continued for several years with the best musician at the seminary, whose gravedigger's breath distorted her arpeggios. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Christian faith contributed to the rise of the modern world, but the Christian faith has been undermined by the modern world it helped to create. The Christian faith thus becomes its own gravedigger. — Os Guinness

I deal with writer's block by lowering my expectations. I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent - and when you don't, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man. Never try to be the hare. All hail the tortoise. — Malcolm Gladwell

Every government is perpetually degenerating towards corruption, from which it must be rescued at certain periods by the resuscitation of its first principles, and the re-establishment of its original constitution. — Samuel Johnson

Over the past sixty years a rather impressive assembly of respectable taxonomists and evolutionary biologists have tried to unseat the biological species concept for a wide variety of reasons. Most of them failed, probably because Ernst Mayr is alive, adroit, and articulate at ninety-six years young as I write these words, and most critics are no match for him. — Stephen J. O'Brien

18The LORD is near to all who call upon Him, To all who call upon Him in truth. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

I don't think there's a back lot here in Hollywood anymore that has those streets, like a French Quarter. — Glenn Danzig

The gravedigger looks like Santa Claus, and I don't believe for a minute he doesn't know it. With his long white beard and stout build, he has to know the effect of wearing a red and white anorak and how inappropriate the whole getup looks in the Mount Zion Cemetery. — Jonathan Tropper

The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It — Mark Twain

My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated. — Joyce Carol Oates