Caitlin Doughty Quotes

I want my funeral to be uncomfortably quiet.

The Westwood Cemetery is just a few blocks from my home, and a number of my very dear friends are buried there.

My own funeral, I'd like to be laid out in a coffin in my own house. I would like my coffin to be put in the double parlor, and I would like all the flowers to be white.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

The first funeral for Andrew Goodman was at night and it was a lot of work. To begin with they had to kill him.

I grew up in a funeral home. Both my parents were morticians.

One can't carry one's father's corpse about everywhere.

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

I never go to funerals. To me a person is dead when he breathes for the last time. After that, your memories should be personal.

Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.

A funeral was a great form of entertainment. A wake was a great form of entertainment.

I done been to so many funerals.

When my dad passed away, I was under a lot of stress with planning a funeral, trying to pick out just the right flowers and pictures, and simply trying to find the right way to say goodbye.

It's not the loss of life that makes the death bitter -- it's the obituaries.

Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.

I turn to the 'Telegraph's' obituaries page with trepidation.

My dad died of a stroke.

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.

The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look 'natural,' but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert.

If I talk about my father's funeral, as I did when I was promoting the last novel, 'Being Dead,' I'm not going to tell any lies, but there are certain things I'm not going to tell you, and I'm certainly not going to tell my grief.

I grew up in a funeral home, born and raised, and everyone was always like, 'Well, what was that like?' and I was like, 'It was normal', because it's all I knew.

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!

If anyone at my funeral has a long face, I'll never speak to him again.

I've just had some bad news. Tomorrow is the mother in law's funeral. And she's cancelled it.

For thousands of years, we did have death surrounding us, and we did have people die in the home. You would take care of your own end. You would do ritual processes, and you would be involved in it, and that's been taken away in the Western world.