Doug Stanhope Quotes

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake--especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.

Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

In our memories, there is a graveyard where we bury our dead. They all lie there together, the loved ones and the ones we hated, friends and foes and kin, with no distinction among them. We have to mourn every one of them, because our memories have made them as much a part of us as our bones or our skin. If we don't, we've no right to remember anything at all.

It’s odd, isn’t it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it’s a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you’re not alone.

When my father died in my arms it had such a profound affect on me that at that very moment when my dad passed I realized that I needed to face my own fears.

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.

My father's body lies in a stone tomb high on a hill. People walk by, pause, think their own thoughts about him and move on, back to their own lives. I can never move on. He is everywhere.

When my dad died a lot of songs came, and they're still coming.

How one deals with the death of a loved one is a highly personalized affair. Some people weep for days; others take a hike in the woods or count rosary beads.

I'm always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I'm listening to it.

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.

My only rule: I never photographed the face of the dead, ever, out of respect for the families.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice.

For a culture that has such a problem with death, we seem to deal with it in a quite bizarre way. We see people shot, killed and blown up, and we find it funny and sexy and all those things. But, the reality of it is that every day people die, and people are really sad and they grieve and they go through a really difficult process with it.

I have a file of letters and bits of ephemera from friends who have died. I have had lots of friends who died of AIDS.

I've had various people close to me die, and I don't necessarily find the idea of death purely depressing.

I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well.

Death is meaningless unless it happens to someone you know.