Steve Earle Quotes

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

For thousands of years, we did have death surrounding us, and we did have people die in the home. You would take care of your own end. You would do ritual processes, and you would be involved in it, and that's been taken away in the Western world.

In order to know a community, one must observe the styles of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony.

Funerals are all abstract ceremony.

Nowhere probably is there more true feeling, and nowhere worse taste, than in a churchyard.

I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.

The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look 'natural,' but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert.

The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter.

There's the constant concern with what happens to you when you die. Every society thinks about that and makes things to deal with that.

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.

People deal with death differently; some even laugh at funerals.

Now hoppin'-john was F. Jasmine's very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john, and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead.

They say funerals are not for the dead but for the living. Those rites are what permit you to move on, so if you don't deal with the remains, you can never deal with the memories. That might be true; we may have walked in their dust down on Venice Minor, but it's not the same as a proper good-bye.

Death was a big part of my life growing up. I went to lots of funerals.

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 hate funerals. They aren't for the guy who's dead. They're for the guys who are left alive and enjoy mourning.

I turned and faced the Olympians. "We need a shroud," I announced, my voice cracking. "A shroud for the son of Hermes.

Funerals...are for the living.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

The only kind office performed for us by our friends of which we never complain is our funeral; and the only thing which we most want, happens to be the only thing we never purchase--our coffin.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of wisdom and should not be done.

I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.