Funeral Quotations

I am at a crossroads; I have always been against armed opposition... I have chosen civil disobedience. But I will apologize to my people if there are funerals coming out of prisons. I will criticize myself and I won't be the mayor of Diyarbakir.

You can have money piled to the ceiling but the size of your funeral is still going to depend on the weather.

I shall never forget the despair and agony on the parents' faces on the awful day of the funeral when the 13 little children, victims not only of John D. Rockefeller, but of the government of the state of Colorado were buried.

When elected officials abandon our environment and ruin our natural resources, public health is endangered. I know the importance of providing a clean environment for our children; I have attended more than one funeral for a child who has died from an asthma attack.

Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral.

Inheritance taxes are so high that the happiest mourner at a rich man's funeral is usually Uncle Sam.

It's often said that life is strange. But compared to what?

We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.

Many old music hall fans were present at the funeral today of Fred 'Chuckles' Jenkins, Britain's oldest and unfunniest comedian. In tribute, the vicar read out one of Fred's jokes, and the congregation had two minutes silence.

A funeral eulogy is a belated plea for the defense delivered after the evidence is all in.

The rationale for tenure is still valid. But the system has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country. Yes, conservative: Economists joke that their discipline advances one funeral at a time, but many fields must wait for wholesale generational turnover before new approaches take hold.

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 any of you cry at my funeral I'll never speak to you again.

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 checked myself out in that funeral parlour scene. I saw myself laughing, because there was a shot of Ed and I together and Mary was right in back of us. My head turned from the camera and I saw myself laughing, because Mary was absolutely brilliant in that thing.

The saddest face I ever saw on Martin Luther King was at the funeral of the four little girls slain in Birmingham, Alabama.

I mean some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to their funeral.

It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.

As a pastor, you get invited into the most poignant moments of people's lives. Whether it's a wedding or a funeral or a hospital visit, you get invited into the center of the event, whether or not you know the people.

When I die, I'll probably climb out of the coffin and play the organ at my own funeral!

People are scared to make something that doesn't look like another film that made a lot of money. It means we get 'Four Weddings And A Funeral' made again and again.

Dad's funeral was standing room only; most in attendance were strangers to me. At the back, a lone Marine stood silently, then left. People told me he'd saved their life or helped them in their darkest hour.

I've been to many funerals of funny people, and they're some of the funniest days you'll ever have, because the emotions run high.

I guess I do prefer a ball cap. I have performed without a cap, mostly at funerals and weddings.

The sort of lifetime achievement stuff that I'm getting now is kind of like Tom Sawyer's funeral because they all know I'm sick. I am getting buildings named after me and awards and stuff.

He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn't work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back... I went to his funeral in Belfast.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.

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

Each family of the United States military now attends to their loved ones funeral with a wrenching worry that it will be met possibly with a protest or a demonstration.

I did become quite well known from 'Four Weddings and a Funeral', and it helped hugely. I wasn't as famous as Hugh Grant, but I certainly began to work.

We make mistakes, we have our faults, and God knows some of us have more than our share, but when danger threatens and duty calls, we go smiling to our own funeral.

These funerals always appear to me the more indecent in a populous city, from the total indifference of the beholders, and the perfect unconcern with which they are beheld.

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.

I remember in 'Pride and Prejudice' I had to do a scene where I broke down. And before we filmed I spent like three hours imagining my mum's funeral. Actually, she's very much alive, happy and healthy. It was really horrible.

I grew up in a secular suburban Jewish household where we only observed the religion on very specific times like a funeral or a Bar Mitzvah.

The formal Washington dinner party has all the spontaneity of a Japanese imperial funeral.

Michael died five years ago this January, and the first thing that really struck me about the script was the part about her peeling off from the funeral and just getting into a rowboat and having a real kind of cry where nobody was.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.

It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.

I wanted to be at my sister's funeral, but my family has always had a complicated dynamic.

There are so many cruel decisions parents have to make when their child dies. The funeral director requested a sheet for the coffin, and I sent the cozy flannel one, pale blue with happy snowmen, that had just been put away with the winter linens.

I used to sing at funeral homes for families that didn't have a vocalist. I didn't get paid. I needed to sing.

I've been at the funerals of a lot of people in my neighborhood. Sometimes when I sit back and relax, I think about that and just blank out.

I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.

I was fantasising about my own death, I started thinking what my funeral would be like and what music would be played, I was at that level of insanity.

My solo album is dead and buried. We had the funeral. It was sad and I cried a lot but it made such a beautiful corpse that we had an open casket.

Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

The reason so many people turned up at his funeral is that they wanted to make sure he was dead.

Depressions may bring people closer to the church but so do funerals.

The big debate right now is if Saddam is alive or dead. He's dead, then he's alive, then dead, then alive. It's just confusing. Today they showed videotape, and Saddam was speaking at his own funeral.

Funerals are a pagan rite. There's not any doubt about it.

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.

I have a hat. It is graceful and feminine and give me a certain dignity, as if I were attending a state funeral or something. Someday I may get up enough courage to wear it, instead of carrying it.

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

You can't choreograph death, but you can choreograph your funeral.

Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.

Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.

When I was a kid, I would fantasize about my own funeral.

The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

When I was 7 years old, I put on shows for everyone at my grandpa's funeral. I was always the little entertainer.

What you need is one black dress I call Plan B. It doesn't have to be fabulous, it just looks good, covers up the problems and is neutral enough for dinner, business, a date, a funeral. You don't overwear it, you don't overwash it, because the Plan B is - gold.

Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals when their cheery effect is needed.

When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.

What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral.

I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris. It was rainy. It was all wrong. And I was thinking, 'God, she loved life so much.'

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success.

My mum passing away wasn't funny, but that funeral and what I went through, the things that happened, looking back at it, there were funny moments. You have to be strong enough to look back at it, to sit and assess the situation.

Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.

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.

I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.

We're going to pillage the three law offices and the Birch Funeral Home.

The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.

You know how funerals are not for the dead, they’re for the living? Bachelor parties are not for the groom, they’re for the uncommitted.

We were trendsetters, ... But people would joke 'Here comes the ice cream truck.' Now it's not unusual to see white limos at a funeral home.

[That] my body be buried as cheaply as possible and no speeches be permitted at my funeral.

I'd say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company (we're the biggest share-holder). They want to be associated with every wonderful image: heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don't want to be associated with presidents' funerals and so-forth.

A president can be unpopular for good reasons. You know, I'm not always on the side that the people are right, for God's sake. But, you know, he's not popular when he goes overseas. He couldn't go to Rosa Parks' funeral.

Although I have always loved the noise of laughter, I really can't fear the coming of quiet. As for funerals, I rather like them. Such nice things are always said about the deceased, I feel sad that they had to miss hearing it all by just a few days.

Jesus ruined every funeral he attended including his own.

Sometimes funerals can be good. It reunites you with your cousins you haven't seen in a while.

A eugoogoolizer...one who speaks at funerals...Or did you think I was too stupid to know what a eugoogooly was?

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.

No American is prepared to attend his own funeral without the services of highly skilled cosmeticians. Part of the American dream, after all, is to live long and die young.

I never go to weddings. Waste of time. Person can get married a dozen times. Lots of folks do. Family like ours, know everybody in the state of Texas and around outside, why, you could spend your life going to weddings. But a funeral, that's different. You only die once.

Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral

I think weddings are sadder than funerals, because they remind you of your own wedding. You can't be reminded of your own funeral because it hasn't happened. But weddings always make me cry.

You are thirty minutes late." "Yes." "Would you be thirty minutes late to a wedding or a funeral?" "No." "Why not, pray tell?" "Well, if the funeral was mine I'd have to be on time. If the wedding was mine it would be my funeral.

We have people who will get on a motorcycle in the dead of winter and ride 350 miles to go to a funeral of a complete stranger and stand there for an hour, at attention, give a salute and go home.

Someone trying to be funny probably isn't as funny as someone who doesn't want to be funny but is and can't help it. Someone being serious or angry might be funny. If you get angry, the first thing I want to do is laugh because I don't know why you're getting that angry. Pathos makes me laugh, funerals make me laugh.

... the introduction of the doctrine of polygamy was the first time in my life that I desired the grave, and I could hardly get over it for a long time. And when I saw a funeral, I felt to envy the corpse its situation.

Much can they praise the trees so straight and high, The sailing pine,the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspin good for staves, the cypress funeral, The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepest still, The yew obedient to the bender's will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill, The myrrh sweet-bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill, The fruitful olive, and the platane round, The carver holm, the maple seldom inward sound.

A woman who feels ugly can go to the best party and have a terrible time, but a woman who likes the way she looks can go to a funeral and have a marvellous time.

We are telling the families that had relatives cremated to call the funeral homes and ask them, 'Were their relatives sent to the place?'

...an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.

At my dad's funeral I didn't cry when my dad died. I did it years later when I forgave him, which I've totally forgiven him and I loved my dad.

Many punishments sometimes, and in some cases, as much discredit a prince as many funerals a physician.

The priesthood is not dying, but the clerical state is dead. It needs to be buried, preferably with a Viking funeral in Boston Harbor so nobody can miss the spectacle of its passing.

The price is typically predicated by the cost of doing business in an area. However, there usually is a significant price difference between buying a casket at a funeral home and buying one at Costco.

Funerals are important rituals. They don't just recognize that a life has ended; they recognize that a life was lived.