Burial Quotes

1. "In recent years, a green burial movement has protested formaldehyde, which oxidizes to formic acid, the toxic in fire ants and bee stingers, as yet one more poison to leach into water tables: careless people, polluting even from the tomb."
Author: Alan Weisman

2. "I could win you a goldfish.""I don't think that's be fair to the goldfish," Gemma said. "I've had about a dozen of them, and they all seem to die within days of me getting them.""Oh, yeah." Alex smiled crookedly. "I remember you making your dad bury them out in the backyard.""They were my pets, and they deserved a proper burial.""I better be careful around you." Alex stepped back from her cautiously, giving her a wide berth. "You're a goldfish mass murderer. I don't know what you're capable of.""Stop!" Gemma laughed. "I didn't kill them on purpose! I was little. I think I overfed them. Out of love, though.""That's even scarier," he teased. "Do you plan to kill me with kindness?""Maybe." She narrowed her eyes at him and tried to look menacing, making him laugh."
Author: Amanda Hocking

3. "Above all, there has never been a community that did not cohabit with its dead. But today, socially, the dead are no more. They are deceased. They are ontic has-beens. And with the vanishing of the dead, the most significant distinction between homo and all other primates is gone. When you show me a paleolithic skull, I recognize it as human not because of the cubic measure of the brain or because of the hand tools found in the grave but because of signs of burial. These reveal that this "person" lived a life on the borderline between the seen and the unseen, in the presence of the living and the dead. Neither the dead nor other invisible beings had to show themselves to be considered social realities."
Author: Barbara Duden

4. "There is a legend that elephant dispose of their dead in secret burial grounds and that none of these has ever been discovered. In support of this, there is only the fact that the body of an elephant, unless he had been trapped or shot in his tracks, has rarely been found. What happens to the old and diseased?Not only natives, but many white settlers, have supported for years the legend (if it is a legend) that elephant will carry their wounded and their sick hundreds of miles, if necessary, to keep them out of the hands of their enemies. And it is said that elephant never forget" (206)."
Author: Beryl Markham

5. "It does not mean much to be important. The most important man at a burial is dead."
Author: C.J. Langenhoven

6. "The spring equinox celebration included a dawn trip to the nearby Rillaton Barrow, a Bronze Age burial mound high up on the Cheesewring Moor, with its entrance facing directly east.‘A great archaeological find, dear,' Mrs Darley informed me, rather breathlessly, as we climbed up to the entrance. ‘A skeleton, dagger and gold cup were all found here. However, the gold cup ended up in the royal bathroom for some considerable time until the death of George V and now stands in the British Museum, although you can see a copy of it in Truro if you wish. Come,' she said, patting the top of the lintel, ‘we'll sit here a while and wait for the sun.'The sun duly arrived in all its spring glory over the eastern horizon, bringing a golden glow to the swathes of mist, which hung in the fields between Dartmoor and Bodmin."
Author: Carole Carlton

7. "Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann's, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones."
Author: Catharine Arnold

8. "All places are alike, and every earth is fit for burial."
Author: Christopher Marlowe

9. "Simon, you gave me no water to wash my feet, but this woman as washed them with her tears. You gave me no kiss, but she has not ceased to kiss my feet. Do no reproach her Simon for you did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed me for my burial."
Author: Clysta Kinstler

10. "WHITE AMERICANS HAVE A VERY UNUSUAL SENSE OF HISTORY. They make it up as they go along, constantly revising to suit their tastes in a manner that would make Stalin blush. Very few of them saw any irony in the fact that during a recent nasty Balkans conflict, when Uncle Sam intervened to stop the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Bosnians, the military action was performed using Apache helicopter gunships. Helicopters named after a people that had been ethnically cleansedin the United States less than one hundred years previously. Sixteen lane highways across the sacred burial grounds. Yee-hah."
Author: Craig Ferguson

11. "I remember that day in early May after Le Vesconte's and Private Pilkington's brief joint burial service, one of the men suggested that we name the small spur of land where they were buried "Le Vesconte Point," but Captain Crozier vetoed that idea, saying that if we named every place where one of us might end up buried after the dead person there, we'd run out of land before we ran out of names."
Author: Dan Simmons

12. "Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don't think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren't paying attention or you've anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don't think life's a comedy - well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh. -Odd Thomas -Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz pg 30 chapter 4"
Author: Dean Koontz

13. "The singing wasn't the hopscotch-jumprope-happy kind. This was the kind of singing that, if you tracked it to its source, you might find a little girl in a moldy old burial dress, her skin pitted & green, with lots of coffin splinters & dirt between her teeth......like a mermaid luring idiot sailors...Winny wasn't a sailor, & he wasn't old enough to get all sexed up by some hot siren."
Author: Dean Koontz

14. "To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)"
Author: Don DeLillo

15. "There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest future, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It's the ocean."
Author: Edward Humes

16. "It was not death, for I stood up,And all the dead lie down;It was not night, for all the bellsPut out their tongues, for noon.It was not frost, for on my fleshI felt siroccos crawl,Nor fire, for just my marble feetCould keep a chancel cool.And yet it tasted like them all;The figures I have seenSet orderly, for burial,Reminded me of mine,As if my life were shavenAnd fitted to a frame,And could not breathe without a key;And I was like midnight, some,When everything that ticked has stopped,And space stares, all around,Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,Repeal the beating ground.But most like chaos,--stopless, cool,Without a chance or spar,--Or even a report of landTo justify despair."
Author: Emily Dickinson

17. "Who is secure in all his basic needs? Who has work, spiritual care, medical care, housing, food, occasional entertainment, free clothing, free burial, free everything? The answer might be nuns and monks, but the standard reply is 'prisoners'."
Author: Erik Von Kuehnelt Leddihn

18. "Very well!" he said. "You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust!" I'd never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber. "All right," I said uncertainly. "But won't we be needing horses for that?" "Not horses," he replied, stepping away from his throne. "Birds."
Author: Ernest Cline

19. "Everyone will have gone then except us, because we're tied to this soil by a roomful of trunks where the household goods and clothing of grandparents are kept, and the canopies that my parenrs' horses used when they came to Macondo, fleeing from the war. We've been sown into this soil by the memory of the remote dead whose bones can no longer be found twenty fathoms under the earth. The trunks have been in the room ever since the last days of the war; and they'll be there this afternoon when we come back from the burial, if that final wind hasn't passed, the one that will sweep away Macondo, its bedrooms full of lizards and its silent people devastated by memories."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

20. "It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do."
Author: Harold Brodkey

21. "I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest."
Author: Herman Melville

22. "There would therefore have been all the more delight at the birth of the first son William within less than a year of Margaret's death, tinged with more than a little anxiety, in view of the fateful words hic incepit pestis, 'here began plague', in the burial part of the register three months later. Just how close this dread flea-borne disease was to the Shakespeares can be guaged from the fact that their Henley Street neighbour Roger Green lost four of his children and town clerk Richard Symons three. One estimate suggests that the town lost around two hundred, or about fifteen per cent, of its population during this single outbreak. It is a sobering thought how much the world could have lost at this time by one ill-chanced flea-bite."
Author: Ian Wilson

23. "There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: "Let us drive as far as our graves."
Author: Isak Dinesen

24. "All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war."
Author: J.G. Ballard

25. "Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence."
Author: J.G. Ballard

26. "And her mother still struggled in these white kitchens in town, humming sweet hymns, tiny, mild eyed and bent, her father still labored on the oyster boats; after a lifetime of labor, should they drop dead tomorrow, there would not be a penny for their burial clothes."
Author: James Baldwin

27. "They have no mercy on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already."
Author: James Joyce

28. "How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell."
Author: Jodi Picoult

29. "By mere burial man arrives not at bliss; and in the future life, throughout its whole infinite range, they will seek for happiness as vainly as they sought it here, who seek it in aught else than that which so closely surrounds them here - the Infinite."
Author: Johann Gottlieb Fichte

30. "The Roman Emperor Julian, writing in the fourth century, regretted the progress of Christianity because it pulled people away from the Roman gods. He said, 'Atheism [I.e. the Christian faith!] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them."
Author: John Piper

31. "There were men and women who appeared as fluid as ghosts, they could have been attending a burial out of curiosity, merely to recall how it had been when they were buried."
Author: José Saramago

32. "Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places."
Author: Leonardo Da Vinci

33. "Prince," says I, "it will go down the easier if you Chew."He did not respond; so I repeated my Instructions.Said he, "We take in the Flesh of other Beasts. We pack ourselves full of them. We are their Burial Ground."The Rest of us- his Mess- gaped.He reached into his Mouth, & removed the Gobbet; and placed the Gobbet on his Plate. He regarded the Plate balanced upon his skinny Knees; & all the life left him as he beheld that Mound of Flesh.Poor, unspeaking, tormented Creature."
Author: M.T. Anderson

34. "Stalin gothic was not so much an architectural style as a form of worship. Elements of Greek, French, Chinese and Italian masterpieces had been thrown into the barbarian wagon and carted to Moscow and the Master Builder Himself, who had piled them one on the other into the cement towers and blazing torches of His rule, monstrous skyscrapers of ominous windows, mysterious crenellations and dizzying towers that led to the clouds, and yet still more rising spires surmounted by ruby stars that at night glowed like His eyes. After His death, His creations were more embarrassment than menace, too big for burial with Him, so they stood, one to each part of town, great brooding, semi-Oriental temples, not exorcised but used."
Author: Martin Cruz Smith

35. "At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors;the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in thegarden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love."
Author: Octavio Paz

36. "What George was thinking was that the late king Herod had been unjustly blamed for a policy which had been both statesmanlike and in the interests of the public. He was blaming the mawkish sentimentality of the modern legal system which ranks the evisceration and secret burial of small boys as a crime."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

37. "Basically, I don't ever move too far past the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, because it's of first importance. And I make sure it's of first importance with anyone I'm talking to. It all comes down to that, really, when you get right down to it. So it's not complex. Jesus removed our sins and guarantees we can be raised from the dead."
Author: Phil Robertson

38. "...Until they stood at last by a crumbling wall, looking up and up and still farther up at the great tombyard top of the old house. For that's what it seemed. The high mountain peak of the mansion was littered with what looked like black bones or iron rods, and enough chimneys to choke out smoke signals from three dozen fires on sooty hearths hidden far below in dim bowels of this monster place. With so many chimneys, the roof seemed a vast cemetery, each chimney signifying the burial place of some old god of fire or enchantress of steam, smoke, and firefly spark. even as they watched, a kind of bleak exhalation of soot breathed up out of some four dozen flues, darkening the sky still more, and putting out some few stars."
Author: Ray Bradbury

39. "Old and alone, thought Pelletier. Just one of thousands of old men on their own. Like the machine célibataire. Like the bachelor who suddenly grows old, or like the bachelor who, when he returns from a trip at light speed, finds the other bachelors grown old or turned into pillars of salt. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of machines célibataires crossing an amniotic sea each day, on Alitalia, eating spaghetti al pomodoro and drinking Chianti or grappa, their eyes half closed, positive that the paradise of retirees isn't in Italy (or, therefore, anywhere in Europe), bachelors flying to the hectic airports of Africa or America, burial ground of elephants. The great cemeteries at light speed. I don't know why I'm thinking this, thought Pelletier. Spots on the wall and spots on the skin, thought Pelletier, looking at his hands. Fuck the Serb."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

40. "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."
Author: Rosamund Lupton

41. "Going up, Herzong found a bouquet of violets, dropped from the hand of a woman. Perhaps a bride. Little perfume remained in them, but they made him remember... These violets smelled to him like female tears. He gave them a burial in the trash ca, hoping they had not dropped from a disappointed hand."
Author: Saul Bellow

42. "As he rounded the corner, he saw two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path. For a moment he was baffled. It seemed to have no agricultural purpose; there was no more planting or ploughing to be done. Then he realized what it was. They were digging a mass grave. He thought of shouting an order to about turn or at least to avert their eyes, but they were almost on it, and some of them had already seen their burial place. The songs died on their lips and the air was reclaimed by the birds."
Author: Sebastian Faulks

43. "Leisure without books is death, and burial of a man alive."
Author: Seneca

44. "All I ask is that my final months be happy ones, and that I be permitted a husband who will see to my proper Christian beheading and burial."
Author: Seth Grahame Smith

45. "I stood there, staring at my clothes. What does a mama wear to her son's funeral? I looked over my wardrobe.There were outfits purchased for work, church, and casual weekends but nothing to wear to the burial of my seventeen-year-old son."
Author: Shelley Ramsey

46. "Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret."
Author: Stephen King

47. "I always have one or two, sometimes more, Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time, I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead, respect for burial sites."
Author: Tony Hillerman

48. "The battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over."
Author: Virginia Woolf

49. "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."
Author: William Shakespeare

50. "And Caesar's spirit, raging for revenge,With Ate by his side come hot from hell,Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war,That this foul deed shall smell above the earthWith carrion men, groaning for burial."
Author: William Shakespeare

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