Matt Roper Quotes

I could not tell you the date of my mother's death. I could not tell you the date of my dad's death. These are not dates that I find significant.

To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

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.

My father died in France, and my sisters and I went over with my mum to bring back his body. I remember going to the funeral parlour in France and being given a laminated menu of coffins, and thinking, surely there is an ice cream at the back of here!

One day, I was at my grandmother's house, and I found diaries that she kept as a young girl. I opened one to a page that had flowers glued inside. In her childish handwriting, my grandmother wrote, 'Pap died today. I am very sad.' The fact that this was true and that I could see the withered flowers made a huge impression on me.

My dad died, and my grandfather died, and my great-grandfather died. And the guy before him, I don't know. Probably died.

When the friends we love the best Lie in their churchyard bed, We must not cry too bitterly Over the happy dead.

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.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?

Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.

The body is the one thing you have to say goodbye to. You can hold on to your memories. You can hold on to the spirit. That's part of the package that you love and the part that comforts you.

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

I always take photographs when I attend a funeral. Most people there know who I am and expect me to be there with my camera.

The reason so many people turned up at his funeral is that they wanted to make sure he was dead.

Just because someone's dead doesn't mean it's over. My grandfather died more than 25 years ago, but I still think of him a lot and smell his smell.

I had a wonderful family including my aunts, uncles and cousins but they've all gone to heaven.

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.

Tombstones don't talk back.

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

I just wish that people will be kinder to me when I pass away.

My dad died of a stroke.

Funeral by funeral, theory advances.

Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government.

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

I've had dialogues with my dead mother over the 40 years since she died.