James Fenton Quotes

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.

Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

Graved inside of it, "Italy".

In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.

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.

The tombstone is about the only thing that can stand upright and lie on its face at the same time.

You look like a talent scout for a cemetery.

Nowhere probably is there more true feeling, and nowhere worse taste, than in a churchyard.

I have my tombstone already. A tombstone company in the East gave it to me when I jumped Snake Canyon. My plot is in Montana.

He would make a lovely corpse.

The beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I often thought my gravestone would say, 'Here lies Gandalf. He came out,'

Here Skugg lies snug As a bug in a rug.

Here lies my wife: here let her lie! Now she's at rest, and so am I.

People love to hate the gravedigger.

We treated all of the dead with dignity.

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.

It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.

Tombstones don't talk back.

I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'

Let there be no inscription upon my tomb; let no man write my epitaph: no man can write my epitaph.

I'll only retire in the day I should be dead and they have me buried, and some idiot spell over my casket some stupid gospel stuff.

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

I especially remember that on All Souls Day, when so many people wanted new monuments for the graves, our whole family pitched in. I did the lettering on the stones, my brother did the carving, and my sisters put the finishing touches on them, the gold leaf and all that.