Burial Practices Quotes

Vaults and caskets are not the law; they are the policy of individual cemeteries. Vaults prevent the settling of the dirt around the body, thus making landscaping more uniform and cost effective. As an added bonus, vaults can be customized and sold at a markup. Faux marble? Bronze? Take your pick, family.

I want upon death to be buried, just like in the old days, where I decompose by the action of microorganisms, and I am dined upon by any form of creeping animal or root system that sees fit to do so.... I will have recycled back to the universe at least some of the energy that I have taken from it. And in so doing, at the conclusion of my scientific adventures, I will have come closer to the heavens than to Earth.

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?

In Moscow they do not pay much attention to the living but keep their cemeteries in a splendid state.

The French, perhaps more than any other nation, cherish the memory of their dead by ornamenting their places of sepulture with the finest flowers, often renewing the garlands and replacing such plants as decay with vigorous and costly ones.

There's also the tradition of voodoo, the Haitian magic arts, in New Orleans. And because New Orleans is below sea level, when they bury people in New Orleans, it's mostly above ground. So you have this idea that the spirits are more accessible and can access you more easily because they're not even buried.

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

Archaeologists have been digging up thousands of graves of people called Scythians by the Greeks. They turn out to be people whose women fought, hunted, rode horses, used bows and arrows, just like the men.

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.

I have frequently thought that the dead should be buried with all their belongings. It seems weirdly perverse that their clothes should still be here when the people you love best in the world have gone.

People's clothes ought to be buried with them.