Quotes about Funerals

“As grand and griefless as a rich man's funeral.”

“The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.”

“Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.”

“Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set.”

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

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

“A funeral is a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker.”

“In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of popular entertainment.”

“I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it. [About a politician who had recently died]”

“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.”

“Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.”

“On a day of burial there is no perspective -- for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was -- to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.”