The Mortuaries Quotes & Sayings

That the sun shines tomorrow is a judgement that is as true as the contrary judgement. — David Hume

The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks was fixed and forced. I'd seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that I was going to grow old and die. — Ross Macdonald

Tem loved the mortuaries, though no one he knew was dead. Still he would beg to go, to grasp the hand of any adult willing to wind down those plush-carpeted stairways, past the sleek vaults, inviting and bright. — Katharine E.K. Duckett

Parts of rural China are seeing a burgeoning market for female corpses, the result of the reappearance of a strange custom called "ghost marriages." Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave. Sometimes, when a man died unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a "wedding," and bury the couple together... A black market has sprung up to supply corpse brides. Marriage brokers - usually respectable folk who find brides for village men - account for most of the middlemen. At the bottom of the supply chain come hospital mortuaries, funeral parlors, body snatchers - and now murderers.
- "China's Corpse Brides: Wet Goods and Dry Goods" The Economist, July 26, 2007 — Danica Novgorodoff

Because his art is such
a difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the world
as visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from high
school or college are becoming junior partners in prestigious
law firms, or opening their own mortuaries, the writer may be
still sweating out his first novel. — John Gardner

Judaism offered no Shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn...no injunction against listening to music or going to work. — Julie Orringer

I would warn very sincerely against the pitfalls of copying photographs. A frozen, split-second bears little relationship to the continuing process of living reality. It is better to look, look again, and keep on looking. — Keith Shackleton

I felt so alone on that train ... a weird, unnatural kind of alone that bore into me. It was feeling just beyond fear and somewhere to the left of sadness. — Maureen Johnson

Mamie told me living rooms were once known as death rooms, back when funerals were a home matter. After mortuaries came into fashion, there was no need for keeping bodies on ice at home, and the death room was rechristened the living room. — Sarah Jude

Every piece of music I have composed reminds me of a different time in my life. — Lior Ron

Thanks to Lana Turner, Eleven Eleven, The Nation, LIT Magazine (USA), Critical Quarterly (UK), Beautiful Outlaw Press, no press, The Capilano Review, cv2, Rhubarb and Centre A Gallery (Canada). — Erin Moure