Fred Allen Quotes

He would make a lovely corpse.

I love a cardboard coffin. Both Mummy and Daddy went off in cardboard coffins, painted - Daddy's was rifle green. Beautifully made.

There are only two kinds of men; the dead and the deadly.

Go now, verses, on your light feet, you have not trodden hard on the old earth where the graves laugh when they see their guests, the one corpse stacked on top of the other. Go now and stagger to her whom I do not know.

Happens to everybody. Horses, dogs, men. Nobody gets out of life alive.

You look like a talent scout for a cemetery.

. . . my bones they'll burn or bury. It'll be my death.

Any day you wake up, maybe you die.

No matter who you are, you will be put abed at last with a shovel.

If Shaw and Einstein couldn't beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.

Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.

People love to hate the gravedigger.

We treated all of the dead with dignity.

Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground.

Boss, life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.

I know all human beings will be successful. How do I know? They all die.

How many people have a family grave in the backyard? I'm sure I'll end up there, or I'll shrink my head and put it in a glass box in the living room. I'll get more tourists to Graceland that way.

Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.

Each instant of life is a step toward death.

Tombstones don't talk back.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don't let yourself believe it will happen to you.

His smile is like the silver plate on a coffin.

Mortality defines the human condition.