Deng Xiaoping Quotes

We simply rob ourselves when we make presents to the dead.

Th' dead ar-re always pop'lar. I knowed a society wanst to vote a monyment to a man an' refuse to help his fam'ly, all in wan night.

We're all cremated equal.

You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.

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?

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

I can't have white roses. They symbolize death.

My husband wanted to be cremated. I told him I'd scatter his ashes at Neiman Marcus - that way, I'd visit him every day.

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.

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.

We don't do funerals in my family.

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.

He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone.

When I die bury me in smoke.

Even if I wanted, I cannot do anything. When they die, we always send for their co-religionists. Muslims take the Muslim's body to bury it, Hindus come and take away the dead to be cremated and Christians come and bury their dead.

Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.

Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.

Death is the least civilized rite of passage.

A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.

Death is something we really understand extremely well.

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.

For reasons of sentiment, I would like part of my ashes to be mixed up with Mama's, and both her ashes and mine put side by side in the columbarium. We were joined in life and I would like our ashes to be joined after this life.

People's clothes ought to be buried with them.