Quotes & Sayings About Tombstones

When I look at these stiffs by the fire, I am looking at a graveyard. There is hardly room to move between the tombstones. . . . The epitaphs are chiseled in sunken shadows on their cheeks — Tom Kromer

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles ... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.. — Milan Kundera

Showmen's Rest was truly something to behold. Throughout the entire yard, statues and carvings of elephants, clowns, and tight-rope walkers danced on the gray and white surfaces of tombstones and grave-markers. For the first time, Michael got the feeling that the men and women who'd been buried there were probably really happy with their final resting place. It was a touching tribute, one that honored their passion in life and that had been constructed out of love and respect. — Jacqueline E. Smith

Jezal swallowed and hunched his shoulders, watching the chunks of long dead wood file slowly past like rows of tombstones. "I don't like this," he muttered under his breath.
"You think I do?" Bayaz frowned grimly over at him. "You think any of us do? Men must sometimes do what they do not like if they are to be remembered. It is through struggle, not ease, that fame and honor are won. It is through conflict, not peace, that wealth and power are gained. — Joe Abercrombie

She glanced around at the tombstones. "You're surrounded by death here. Way too depressing. You really might want to think about getting another job."
"You see death and sadness in these sunken patches of dirt, I see lives lived fully and the good deeds of past generations influencing the future ones. — David Baldacci

Having read the inscriptions upon the tombstones of the great and little cemeteries, Wang Peng advised the Emperor to kill all the living and resurrect the dead. — Paul Eldridge

The cold hoarfrost glistened on the tombstones, and sparkled like rows of gems, among the stone carvings of the old church. The snow lay hard and crisp upon the ground; and spread over the thickly-strewn mounds of earth, so white and smooth a cover, that it seemed as if corpses lay there, hidden only by their winding sheets. — Charles Dickens

Actually I like the idea of being a Renaissance hack. If tombstones were still in style, I would want to have the two words chiseled right under my name. — Dennis Flanagan

Though angels were easy to finds in cemeteries, she said that she didn't especially care for funereal angels and tombstone cherubs
she wanted her angels among the living, not watching over the already dead
and thus she scoured parks and gardens for the angels with whom, on some level, she wanted to commune. — Chris Bohjalian

Just put, "We was having fun on our Tombstones!"

NjbV — Neal J.B. Verne

The shadows of the tombstones in the graveyard stretched out long and violet, and the sound of the flies buzzed in my ears, louder than the ringing of the shots that still came - were coming closer - to the frail barrier of the dead. — Diana Gabaldon

Do not save your loving speeches
For your friends till they are dead;
Do not write them on their tombstones,
Speak them rather now instead. — Anna Mickelson

Bah, tombstones are only good for pigeons to sit on — Vladimir Lenin

Death continues to stalk the streets, stealing the souls of our children as they sleep. We're running out of fingers to close their eyes, voices to bless their souls, hands to dig their graves. Poisonous fumes from their unburied bodies contaminate the alleys, and the ghosts of those who have been buried rise nightly. Their tiny forms dance above their tombstones, an agonising reminder that we've failed them. — Joanne Owen

When Harper was in among the stones she could see brass plaques screwed into the towering pillars of granite. One listed the names of seventeen boys who had died in the mud of eastern France during the First World War. Another listed the names of thirty-four boys who had died on the beaches of western France during the Second. Harper thought all tombstones should be this size, that the small blocks to be found in most graveyards did not even begin to express the sickening enormity of losing a virgin son, thousands of miles away, in the muck and cold. You needed something so big you felt it might topple over and crush you. — Joe Hill

Only with kisses and red poppies can I love you,
with rain-soaked wreaths,
contemplating ashen horses and yellow dogs.
Only with waves at my back can I love you,
between dull explosions of brimstone and reflective waters,
swimming against cemeteries that circulate in certain rivers,
drowned pasture flooding the sad, chalky tombstones,
swimming across submerged hearts
and faded lists of unburied children. — Pablo Neruda

You ever see that thing on old tombstones, that Momento mori? That's Latin. You know what it means?" The roommate gave a negative grunt. "It means something like, 'Remember you gotta die.' And that's what this whole thing is like, like one great big reminder that we're all gonna go sooner or later, so we better be damn good to each other while we're here. — Chet Williamson

Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever. — Thomm Quackenbush

I wonder how many of our tombstones will have to be inscribed with the epitaph 'Died of too many meetings'? — Hannah Whitall Smith

Tombstones grew like ragged, rotting teeth from the mushy grass-covered ground. — Fiona Druce

Only she began to be afraid of the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under Tevershall church, and which she saw with such grim painfulness from the park. — D.H. Lawrence

Who's afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don't know. The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale - and ultimately it is a gamble - demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world. — Ada Louise Huxtable

A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately. — Terry Eagleton

The old dead trees are the most fascinating - the countless trees lying in the gullies and up the hills that fell perhaps a century ago, pulling up their roots from the earth as they toppled. The great upheavals left rocks in their huge tentacles and, as they slowly rot, the trunks are home to populations of creatures, from goannas to wild pigs. As grey as tombstones in a cemetery they lie there, having outlasted generations of farmers, as they'll outlast me. In their own way they are as beautiful, more beautiful, than living trees. — Phillip Adams

You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'roundWith tombstones in their eyesBut the pusher don't careAh, if you live or if you die — Hoyt Axton

With its missed lines and falling tombstones, 'Dark Shadows' was sometimes inadvertently funny, but what made the show work was the fact that the actors and the writers took it all very seriously. — William J. Mann

old books -- little tombstones of ideas and history — Amy Tan

The majority of my symphonies are tombstones. — Dmitri Shostakovich

We think of mortality so little these days ...
I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones.
Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I:
As I am so will you be ... — Tana French

I've done a lot of death cartoons - tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries ... I'm not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes. — Roz Chast

She could feel it brimming on her lips, that superstar smile, the bow shape, the teeth long and solid tombstones. — Aimee Bender

It's like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world. — Christopher Hitchens

Now we lie here, a decapitated generation, our child-like names vanishing on tombstones, can't you see? Once there was Rock 'n' Roll, freedom of speech, baroque picnics on miraculous boats, there was resurrection on romantic lakes, there were melting kisses under golden trees, there was ticking laughter, clicking metaphors, there were wine and poetic sex, beauty ... — Laura Gentile

The lies of centuries, the lies of love,
the lies of Socrates and Blake and Christ
will be your bedmates and tombstones
in a death that will never end. — Charles Bukowski

Maximus said, "They have no tombstones. Not one man in Treverorum wept for their passing." he looked at his audience in turn and smiled. "In the name of Mithras, my master, may the gods be kind to you on your journey. — Wallace Breem

When I looked at them sitting around me, the church in the distance, beyond that our school, with throngs of girls crossing back and forth in the schoolyard, beyond that the world, how I wished that everything would fall away, so that suddenly we'd be sitting in some different atmosphere, with no future full of ridiculous demands, no need for any sustenance save our love for each other, with no hindrance to any of our desires, which would, of course, be simple desires - nothing, nothing, just sitting on our tombstones forever. — Jamaica Kincaid

The picture of helpless indolence she calls herself
sublimely helpless and impotent
I had done living I thought
Was ever life so like death before? My face was so close against the tombstones,
that there seemed no room for tears. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Who chose burial monuments? Were the wishes of the deceased taken into consideration? It was a subject I'd never considered before. — Susan Hubbard

At the great iron gate of the churchyard he stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell. — Charles Dickens

the way in which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was "showing off," so I put in a word to keep him going. "Oh, Mr. Swales, you can't be serious. Surely these tombstones are not all wrong?" "Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin' where they make out the people too good, for there be folk that do think a balm-bowl be like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing be only lies. Now look you here. You come here a stranger, — Bram Stoker

I've discovered that life doesn't always turn on the obvious things - people dying, marriages, all the stuff that gets carved on the tombstones - but little unrecorded things too. — Eve Chase

It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones. — Franz Kafka

Don't take anything for granite. That's what tombstones are made of. — John R. Erickson

Tombstones don't talk back. — Leland Chapman

I don't know whether it is that I am built wrong, but I never did seem to hanker after tombstones myself. I know that the proper thing to do, when you get to a village or town, is to rush off to the churchyard, and enjoy the graves; but it is a recreation that I always deny myself. I take no interest in creeping round dim and chilly churches behind wheezy old men, and reading epitaphs. Not even the sight of a bit of cracked brass let into a stone affords me what I call real happiness. — Jerome K. Jerome

I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! — Charles Lamb

The legends on the tombstones are eventually worn away as the stone is eroded by rain and wind and centuries. Better to slip away quietly after having lived as fully as one can, doing the very best one can with the gifts one has been given. — Barbara Quick

Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform. — Jacob M. Appel

As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above", I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. — Charles Dickens

I must say, some are not very beautifully made. They're coffee-table books for people who drink alcohol. I have nothing against coffee-table books as long as they are well done. They must not look like gravestones on a table. Sometimes they are too big, they come in boxes and things like this. No, a book has to be easy to open and you don't have to be a bodybuilder to lift it. I like books I can read in bed. Those big tombstones would kill me. — Karl Lagerfeld

When I was younger, I loved graveyards. They weren't spooky so much as mysterious. Each tombstone another story to uncover. Another life to learn about.
Now that I'm older - I won't say how old - I hate graveyards. The only life - or rather death - I see in the tombstones is my own. — Pseudonymous Bosch

Intense sunlight rained down on a half-submerged city. Waves crashed between buildings that stood like waterlogged tombstones. Skyscrapers of smashed glass and twisted rusting metal jutted from the churning swell as islands of broken dreams. A familiar tower with a familiar clock face ... Big Ben. London stared back at Blue. What was left of it. A sea-drowned cemetery for a time and a place long dead. — Kev Heritage

The epitaphs on tombstones of a great many people should read: Died at thirty, and buried at sixty. — Nicholas Murray Butler

When the weather's nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie's grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn't too bad when the sun was out, but twice - twice - we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That's what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner - everybody except Allie. I couldn't stand it. I know it's only his body and all that's in the cemetery, and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand it anyway. I just wished he wasn't there. — J.D. Salinger

All our dreams and hopes become as naught, and evil men are allowed to hang their lanterns on our tombstones. What greater folly is there? — James Lee Burke

There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother's room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, 'Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again? — Charles Dickens

In the center of the sofa were two oblong companion pillows, shouldered so closely together that they looked like the Decalogue tablets. They were white, or had been white, and painfully stitched upon them with blue thread were companion mottoes, companion pictures. In the left pillow lies a girl, her long blue hair asprawl about her face, her eyes innocently shut, asleep. The motto: I SLEPT AND DREAMED THAT LIFE WAS BEAUTY. But the story continued, and on the next pillow her innocence is all torn away: there she stands, gripping a round broom; her hair now is pinned up severely and behind her sits a disheartening barrel churn. I WOKE AND FOUND THAT LIFE WAS DUTY. The pillows sat, stuffed and stiff as disapproving bishops; they could, he thought, serve as twin tombstones for whole gray generations. — Fred Chappell

My mother's family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, He was named after the prophet Jerry Mire. — Pat Conroy

The moonlight covered the tombstones with an ethereal glow, and the statues
above the tombs stood like silent guards waiting for something to happen. — Alan Kinross

Paintings, like tombstones, will last a good five hundred years, well into twenty or thirty generations. — Robert Genn

We will have have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross. — G.K. Chesterton

Unvisited tombstones, unread diaries, and erased video game high-score rankings are three of the most potent symbols of mankind's pathetic and fruitless attempts at immortality. — Sarah Silverman

Many peoples' tombstones should read 'Died at 30, burried at 60.' — Nicholas M. Butler

My grandmother was unsurpassable at sitting. She would sit on tombstones, glaciers, small hard benches with ants crawling over them, fragments of public monuments, other people's wheelbarrows, and when one returned one could be sure of finding her there, conversing affably with the owner of the wheelbarrow. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

At one time, the state of culture in Czechoslovakia was described, rather poignantly, as a 'Biafra of the spirit' ... I simply do not believe that we have all lain down and died. I see far more than graves and tombstones around me. I see evidence of this in ... expensive books on astronomy printed in a hundred thousand copies (they would hardly find that many readers in the USA) ... — Vaclav Havel

Certain living things prefer the dark, thriving in the shadows of tombstones and crypts, flowering admist the dead. Others tend toward the sun, blooming in the light, embracing the warmth. — Fiona Paul

The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for
for what? Someday we'll know. — Edward Abbey

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Many people often ask God for a sign, believing that the sign will be smooth sailing, perfect windspeed, moderate temperatures ... so when the winds dance and the waves sing and the temperatures confuse, they think that God's not there anymore. They believe that God is saying, "Watch out! Don't go there!" But the thing is, when something is good, it's not smooth sailing and perfect windspeed and moderate temperatures that are the signs to look out for! When something is good, it has mountain ranges, precipices, cliffs, eagles, tombstones covered in ivy and lily of the valley, mountain goats and a wind so close to the mouth of God that it shakes your flesh to its very core! So when they begin to hop on the precipices and hear the eagles' call - they think God isn't there! They think God is saying "Watch out!" They too often fail to traverse the ivy-encrusted tombstones, to tremble and quiver in beauty under God's breath. Don't run away. — C. JoyBell C.

We stood in the graveyard, among the tombstones, forty-some dead people and me. A couple of my fellow funeral-goers had even been in their own coffins, deep under several feet of French soil. — Amy Plum

The tombstones smashed in Hebrew cemeteries and plundered for Polish sidewalks; today bored citizens, staring at their feet while waiting for a bus, can still read the inscriptions. — Anne Michaels

The graveyard was at the top of the hill. It looked over all of the town. The town was hills - hills that issued down in trickles and then creeks and then rivers of cobblestone into the town, to flood the town with rough and beautiful stone that had been polished into smooth flatness over the centuries. It was a pointed irony that the very best view of the town could be had from the cemetery hill, where high, thick walls surrounded a collection of tombstones like wedding cakes, frosted with white angels and iced with ribbons and scrolls, one against another, toppling, shining cold. It was like a cake confectioner's yard. Some tombs were big as beds. From here, on freezing evenings, you could look down at the candle-lit valley, hear dogs bark, sharp as tuning forks banged on a flat stone, see all the funeral processions coming up the hill in the dark, coffins balanced on shoulders.
("The Candy Skull") — Ray Bradbury

The odor of bowel wind is known to every human, but the fragrance of book glue has crossed only a fraction of mortal nostrils. And yet it behooves us not to judge the unlettered too harshly. We must stay the impulse to write CHUCKLEHEAD above their doors and carve DOLT upon their tombstones. — James K. Morrow

We are all servants of some sort, and if the fact that we are faithful can be truthfully inscribed on our tombstones, nothing more need be added. — L.M. Montgomery