Robert W. Service 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.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

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

I miss all of my old friends who have passed away. Sometimes you just don't understand why they were taken so soon. I loved and miss Johnny Cash. I miss my old buddy Johnny Paycheck, who happens to be buried in an area of the cemetery that I bought for my family.

Death, vicious death, Leave a green branch for love.

Holly died without a friend to hold her hand. Artemis felt her go, another gift of the magic. He kept on counting, brushing away the tears on his cheeks.

In death, lie. In living, cry. Carry me home to remember to be remembered.

You'll come to my grave? To tell me your problems?" My problems? "Yes.' And you'll give me answers? "I'll give you what I can. Don't I always?" I picture his grave, on the hill, overlooking the pond, some little nine foot piece of earth where they will place him, cover him with dirt, put a stone on top. Maybe in a few weeks? Maybe in a few days? I see myself sitting there alone, arms across my knees, staring into space. It won't be the same, I say, not being able to hear you talk. "Ah, talk . . . " He closes his eyes and smiles. "Tell you what. After I'm dead, you talk. And I'll listen.

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.

When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

The ocean moans over dead men's bones.

When one by one our ties are torn, and friend from friend is snatched forlorn; when man is left alone to mourn, oh! then how sweet it is to die!

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

You get to an age when you lose people close to you.

One of the wonderful things about this glorious holiday trip I'm on is that I'm in public with people. It hasn't been inclined... I don't know - something to do with the death of my wife. It's inclined to make me isolated.

I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.

While I have felt lonely many times in my life, the oddest feeling of all was after my mother, Lucille, died. My father had already died, but I always had some attachment to our big family while she was alive. It seems strange to say now that I felt so lonely, yet I did.

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

We die as often as we lose a friend.

Michael died five years ago this January, and the first thing that really struck me about the script was the part about her peeling off from the funeral and just getting into a rowboat and having a real kind of cry where nobody was.

I am left alone in the wide world. My own dear family I have buried: one in Rangoon, and two in Amherst. What remains for me but to hold myself in readiness to follow the dear departed to that blessed world, 'Where my best friends, my kindred dwell, where God, my Saviour, reigns.'

Memory, in widow's weeds, with naked feet stands on a tombstone.

When the people you love are gone, you're alone.

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.