Jessica Mitford Quotes

To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.

In America, burial means an embalmed body in a heavy-duty casket with a vault built over it, so that the ground doesn't settle. That body is encased in many layers of denial.

Our respect for the dead, when they are just dead, is something wonderful, and the way we show it more wonderful still. We show it with black feathers and black horses; we show it with black dresses and black heraldries; we show it with costly obelisks and sculptures of sorrow, which spoil half of our beautiful cathedrals. We show it with frightful gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone, in the midst of the quiet grass; and last, and not least, we show it by permitting ourselves to tell any number of falsehoods we think amiable or credible in the epitaph.

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

Being a good embalmer is a thankless job.

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.

One of the things that was most shocking to me about starting to work in the funeral industry is just how industrial the environment is.

The funeral business is so manipulative emotionally. I would want to be thrown into the sea or burned - something that's not a big hassle.

Don't think I'd really want to be a mortician. Wouldn't be getting much back.

I have a hard problem, being some part Native American - being a Christian: do you get burned, do you get cremated, do you get - let the sharks eat you? How do you die?

I've always said I would want to be a funeral director if I wasn't an actor.

I grew up in a funeral home. Both my parents were morticians.

It amazes me that the most Christian funerals are the most barbaric funeral rites of passage that are celebrated anywhere in the world.

The home funeral - caring for the dead ourselves - changes our relationship to grieving. If you have been married to someone for 50 years, why would you let someone take them away the moment they die?

The universal practice of closing the eyes of the dead may be thought to have originated in the desire that he might be prevented from seeing his way.

On 'Six Feet Under,' I never really had much to do with the actual business, with the embalming stuff. That wasn't really my role.

Death is the least civilized rite of passage.

Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the Chicago Tribune in 1932, 'not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly.

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead?

I went to a funeral recently, and they handed out Kleenex before the funeral. Which I thought was cocky.

People's clothes ought to be buried with them.

That's the formaldehyde. That's why Granny's so well-preserved.

Being a man of the theater and a hedonist, I find the idea of building coffins very romantic.

Gavin saw a grave purely as a marker for the place where a corpse was decomposing; a nasty thought, yet people took it into their heads to visit and bring flowers, as though it might yet recover.

Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.