Mourning Customs Quotes

Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us.

What does one do about the dead? They live forever.

Hired mourners at a funeral say and do - A little more than they whose grief is true

Frankly, I'm not much for funerals unless it's absolutely an obligation. I don't feel it serves much of a purpose to go and see my friends just lying there, dead. I try to pay my respects to my friends when they're alive.

You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good . . . Joan Crawford is dead. Good.

In the last 48 hours King Abdullah from Saudi Arabia passed away. I have a moral dilemma. The king passed away three or four days ago. Is it too soon to hit on Queen Latifah?

Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.

In China, the dead are not forgotten - my relatives cheerfully pointed out all the niches of deceased friends and family, as if gesturing at the homes of the living.

At the other end of the room, Grandma had the lid up on Larry Lipinski. She was standing one foot on a folding chair, one foot on the edge of the casket, and she was taking pictures with a disposable camera.

The funeral is a quiet one, despite the number of mourners present. There are no sobs or flailing handkerchiefs. There is a smattering of color amongst the sea of traditional black. Even the light rain cannot push it down into the realms of despair. It rests instead in a space of thoughtful melancholy.

Nothing says "deeply in mourning" like canapés and free beer.

The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.

Let no one pay me honor with tears, nor celebrate my funeral rites with weeping.

In the custom of mourning, the fabric of the night had been ripped, revealing a star at each tiny tear.

There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren't for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family's turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.

To her bier Comes the year Not with weeping and distress, as mortals do, But, to guide her way to it, All the trees have torches lit; Blazing red the maples shine the woodlands through.

I make it a kind of pious rule to go to every funeral to which I am invited, both as I wish to pay a proper respect to the dead, unless their characters have been bad, and as I would wish to have the funeral of my own near relations or of myself well attended.

Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

Shoulda sent a thank you note, you little hoe Now Imma wrap your coffin wit a bow

Funerals should celebrate a life.

None mourn more ostentatiously over the death of Germanicus than those who most rejoice at it [a death].

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of wisdom and should not be done.

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.

Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works.