Quotes about cemetery (67 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Source: Malcolm X Speaks (1965), p. 12

Peace , Law

“They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!”

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“There is nothing in our book, the Qur'an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays a hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That's a good religion.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

November 10, 1963
This was said before Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and as he himself stated, before he truly understood Islam.
Malcolm X Speaks (1965)

Books , Peace , Religion , Law

“All true stories begin and end in a cemetery" - The Shadow of the Wind”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Books , Time

“The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.”

Emile Zola (1840–1902) French writer (1840-1902)

Source: The Masterpiece

Past

“The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

homily of J-P II at Radom military base in Warsaw, Poland on June 4, 1991.
Source: Unborn Word of the Day http://unbornwordoftheday.com/2007/07/13/jpii-revealed-heartfelt-pain-about-abortion-to-his-countrymen/

“Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Ch. 13 http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-13.html
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

Death , Hunger , People , Hell

“No doubt the great majority of them are in the cemetery long ago, and I suppose the rest of us will join them before long. Speaking for myself I am willing; in fact I believe I have been willing ever since I was eighteen years old; not urgent, but willing, merely willing.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 288

“We think that a powerful and vigorous movement is impossible without differences — "true conformity" is possible only in the cemetery.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Stalin's article "Our purposes" Pravda #1, (22 January 1912)
Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews

Thinking

“I am a cemetery loathed by the moon.”

Charles Baudelaire book Le Spleen de Paris

Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune.
"Spleen (II)" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Spleen_%282%29
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
Source: Paris Spleen

“Being President is like being the groundskeeper in a cemetery: there are a lot of people under you, but none of them are listening.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

People

“I'll take the cemetery," Kane said. He didn't sound excited. Rather, he sounded resigned. "The club might collapse if I go.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Night

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

Preface
Source: Adonais (1821)

Love , Death , Thinking , Winter

“Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery?”

Daniel Handler book Why We Broke Up

Source: Why We Broke Up

Dead

“For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.”

John Scalzi Old Man's War

Source: Old Man's War

Hate , Dead

“One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.

In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Hope , Personality , Dead

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful… that's what matters to me.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal (Summer 1993)
1990s
Variant: Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me… Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful… that's what matters to me.

Night

“He avoids the official "heroes'" cemetery, done in such impeccable taste. Why, he wonders, do the Germans do so much for their dead and so little for the living?”

Heinrich Böll (1917–1985) German author, novelist, and short story writer

You Enter Germany (1967); cited from Aufsätze, Kritiken, Reden (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1967) p. 278. Translation: "You are Now Entering Germany", in Leila Vennewitz (trans.) Missing Persons and Other Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994) p. 48.

Dead

“Peace is not the silence of cemeteries, but the song of social justice.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Rights expert urges the UN General Assembly to adopt a more decisive role in peace-making (For International Day of Peace, Saturday 21 September 2013) http://dezayasalfred.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/rights-expert-urges-the-un-general-assembly-to-adopt-a-more-decisive-role-in-peace-making-for-international-day-of-peace-saturday-21-september-2013/.
2013, 2013 - International Peace Day

Peace , Justice , Silence

“Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution

Life , Idea , Science , Dead

“Goul or ghul, in Arabic, signifies any terrifying object which deprives people of the use of their senses; hence it became the appellative of that species of monster which was supposed to haunt forests, cemeteries, and other lonely places, and believed not only to tear in pieces the living, but to dig up and devour the dead.”

Brian McNaughton (1935–2004) US author

Attributed to McNaughton online, this actually is a quote from an English edition of The History of the Caliph Vathek (1786) by William Thomas Beckford, as translated by Samuel Henley.
Misattributed

People , Sense , Tear , Dead

“Out whole civilization was a cemetery where Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but indecipherable names on moldering stones; and the mourners who stood round affecting a pretense of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions which once were holy, or at least to utter one heart-felt word of grief and despair about this world that is no more. And nothing was left them but the embarrassed grimaces of a company round a grave.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)

World , Heart , Christ , Despair

“Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Death , Secret , Reality , Memory

“Though man's feeling for the other-worldly often has recourse to solitude, solitude does not foster its development; rather, it is nourished by communion, to which the church is more propitious than the cemetery.”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

Part II, Chapter III
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

Feeling , Solitude

“.. the great white blanket of snow [in one of his painting of Cemetery / Church in the Snow, mid-1820's].... the essence of the utmost purity, beneath which nature prepares herself for a new life..”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

Quote of Friedrich, mid-1820's; as cited by Sigrid Hinz, Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnisse, p. 133; as cited in Religious Symbolism in Caspar David Friedrich, by Colin J. Bailey https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m2225&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF, paper; Oct. 1988 - Edinburgh College of Art, p. 17
1794 - 1840

Life , Nature , Painting

“Everything the British Empire built here will be history. Most of it already is, but it’s a history that has left its mark. In the War Cemetery at Sai Wan Bay you can see it clearly: understated but indelible. The armed forces of Imperial Japan tried to enslave the whole of the East, including Japan itself. Caught up in the terrible war that raged in Asia and the Pacific, a lot of our people who came out here to fight never came home. They died in a good cause. But if the people in this graveyard were somehow to learn that yet another tyranny was on the way, they would find it hard to rest in peace. One of them is my father, who has lain here now for fifty years. He lived and died under our old empire without ever thinking that it was wonderful beyond question. But he thought that it created more than it destroyed, and he was right. The best hope of our last colony is that when the men from the mainland finally take over they will not try to rewrite history by pretending we were never here. Some of us will always be here.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

On the then imminent transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the British Empire to the People's Republic of China. From Clive James' Postcard from Hong Kong.
Television and radio

Men , War , People , Peace

“I have seen something of the project of M. de St. Pierre, for maintaining a perpetual peace in Europe. I am reminded of a device in a cemetery, with the words: Pax perpetua; for the dead do not fight any longer: but the living are of another humor; and the most powerful do not respect tribunals at all.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

Letter 11 to Grimarest: Passages Concerning the Abbe de St. Pierre's 'Project for Perpetual Peace (June 1712). Taken from Leibniz: Political Writings (2nd Edition, 1988), Edited by Patrick Riley.

Peace , Fight , Dead

“The crust of our earth is a great cemetery, where the rocks are tombstones on which the buried dead have written their own epitaphs.”

Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) Swiss naturalist

Geological Sketches (1870), ch. 2, p. 31 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018968388;view=1up;seq=49

Dead

“Let us be honest. Suppose a man came into this city and should meet a funeral procession, and say, “Who is dead?” and they should reply, “The son of a widow; her only support.” Suppose he should say to the procession, “Halt!” and to the undertaker, “Take out that coffin, unscrew that lid. Young man, I say unto thee, arise!” and the dead should step from the coffin and in a moment afterward hold his mother in his arms. Suppose this stranger should go to your cemetery and find some woman holding a little child in each hand, while the tears fell upon a new-made grave, and he should say to her, “Who lies buried here?” and she should reply, “My husband;” and he should cry, “I say unto thee, oh grave, give up thy dead!” and the husband should rise, and in a moment after have his lips upon his wife’s, and the little children with their arms around his neck; do you think that the people of this city would kill him? Do you think any one would wish to crucify him? Do you not rather believe that every one who had a loved one out in that cemetery would go to him, even upon their knees, and beg him to give back their dead? Do you believe that any man was ever crucified who was the master of death?”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Orthodoxy (1884)

Love , Death , Children , People

“[Kenneth Patchen] has a real, but disorganized, self-indulgent, but rather commonplace talent.
This is not Mr. Patchen’s opinion of himself. (Nor is it that of William Carlos Williams, who almost invents a new language, a kind of system of emotional nonsense syllables, in his effort to praise Mr. Patchen properly. For instance, Mr. Patchen is “a hawk on the grave of John Donne.” I should have called him a parrot on the stones of half a cemetery.)”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Poetry in a Dry Season”, p. 35
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Effort

“—On the dedication page of the rebellion, we see the words “To Clementine”. A fine sentiment, miscellaneous organ music next, and, turning several pages, massed orange flags at the head of the column. This will not be easy, but neither will it be hard. Good will is everywhere, and the lighthearted song of the gondoliers is heard in the distance.
—Yes, success is everything. Morally important as well as useful in a practical way.
—What have the rebels captured thus far? One zoo, not our best zoo, and a cemetery. The rebels have entered the cages of the tamer animals and are playing with them, gently.
—Things can get better, and in my opinion will.
—Their Graves Registration procedures are scrupulous—accurate and fair.
—There’s more to it than playing guitars and clapping along. Although that frequently gets people in the mood.
—Their methods are direct, not subtle. Dissolution, leaching, sandblasting, cracking and melting of fireproof doors, condemnation, water damage, slide presentations, clamps and buckles.
—And skepticism, although absolutely necessary, leads to not very much.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Crisis”, opening
Great Days (1979)

People , Music , Way , Mood

“The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book Memoirs of Hadrian

La mémoire de la plupart des hommes est un cimetière abandonné, où gisent sans honneurs des morts qu'ils ont cessé de chérir.
Source: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), p. 209

Men , Lie , Memory , Dead

“I have gone home (or "Going home") — the Boy Scout trail sign "☉" on his tombstone in a tiny cemetery of Nyeri, Kenya.”

Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941) lieutenant-general in the British Army, writer, founder and Chief Scout of the Scout Movement

Home , Boy , Scouting

“Once again there appears to be a considerable difference of opinion. I wanted a series with distinction, I have no interest in a series which is purely and uniquely suspenseful but makes no comment about anything. But all they seem to want is maniacs in a cemetery. When I complain they pat me on the head, condescend, and hope I go away. When I was on the Twilight Zone I took the bows, but I also took the brickbats, because when it was bad it was usually my fault, but when it's bad on the Night Gallery, I had nothing to do with it, yet my face is on it all the time.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Rod Serling: American Masters.
Other

Hope , Appearance , Time , Night

“Yesterday we came across a cemetery that had been completely destroyed by shellfire. The graves had been blown up, and the coffins lay about in the most uncomfortable positions. The shells had unceremoniously exposed their distinguished occupants to the light of day, and bones, hair, and bits of clothing could be seen through cracks in the burst-open coffins.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

letter to his first wife Minna, from the front, 1915; as quoted in Max Beckmann, Stephan Lackner, Bonfini Press Corporation, Naefels, Switzerland, 1983, p. 14
1900s - 1920s

Light , Clothes

“I stared down at the cemetery and the sight felt rich, rewarding, physically so, in the actual eyes. The very eyeball itself felt good. I became the most recent person on earth to see that everyone in every single or double plot had known life in all its extremes. They had all known extreme pain and stress; all been overjoyed. All had been enchanted; and they'd all known extreme grief so bad they thought it must be meant for another species.”

Robert Newman (1964) British comedian, born 1964

Dependence Day (1994).

Life , Pain , Personality

“Because he attempted to tell [in his painting 'The Jewish Cemetery' painted by Ruisdael, ] that which is outside the reach of art…. there are ruins to indicate old age, a stream to signify the course of life, and rocks and precipices to shadow forth its dangers. But how are we to discover all this?”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 304
posthumous, undated

Life , Age , Art , Painting

“I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.”

Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) American politician

Epitaph on his grave in Lancaster, Pensylvania
1860s

Life , Death , Nature , Solitude

“Joined together with bones and sinews, having a plastering of skin and flesh, covered with hide, the body is not seen as it really is—full of intestines, full of stomach, of the lump of the liver, of bladder, of heart, of lungs, of kidneys and of spleen, of mucus, of saliva, and of sweat, and of lymph, of blood, of synovial fluid, of bile, and of fat, … and its hollow head is filled with brain. A fool, overwhelmed by ignorance, thinks of it as beautiful, but when it lies dead, swollen up and discoloured, cast away in a cemetery, relatives have no regard for it. Dogs devour it, and jackals, and wolves and worms. Crows and vultures devour it, and whatever other living creatures there are. The bhikkhu possessing knowledge here, having heard the Buddha's word, indeed understands it, for he sees the body as it really is.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

§ 194-202
Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Khuddaka Nikaya (Minor Collection), Sutta Nipata (Suttas falling down)

Beauty , Dogs , Fools , Understanding

“If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.
They're right. It does.
However much you beg it to stop.
It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.
It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life…
All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.
Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.
Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.
And then the world turns…
And somebody falls off…
And oh God it's such a long way down.
Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller…
Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.
We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.
Trying to measure how far we have to fall.
No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives…
Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold.
"Time's a great healer."
"At least it was quick.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

"The world keeps turning.
Oh Alec—
Alec's dead."
Swamp Thing (1983–1987)

Life , Women , Men , God

“My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)

Life , Way

“A great many film stars perched on unstable ravine edges in the canyon systems of Los Angeles will, like the cemeteries there, eventually slide down to join their unfortunate fellows in the canyon floors, with mud, cars, and embalmed or living film stars in one glorious muddy mass. We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes…”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 9.4

Angels , Cars , Star

“I don’t believe in western morality, i. e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: "Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)." The first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East. First, the Arabs will stop using children as shields. Second, they will stop taking hostages knowing that we will not be intimidated. Third, with their holy sites destroyed, they will stop believing that G-d is on their side. Result: no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war. Zero tolerance for stone throwing, for rockets, for kidnapping will mean that the state has achieved sovereignty. Living by Torah values will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention.”

Manis Friedman (1946) American rabbi

Answer for the question "How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors?" for the "Moment" magazine. http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2009/2009-06/200906-Ask_Rabbis.html
On the Israeli-Arab conflict

Women , Men , War , Children

“Dark underbelly to all of this. Sarajevo, where the [Olympic] Games were held in '84, is under threat. The UN and NATO have ordered the Serbs to have their big guns off the surrounding hills by midnight, February 20. All the love that is being manifested in these Games was once manifested in Sarajevo. The cameras pan across the great stadium — bombed out, an empty shell. […] Ten years ago, all that glory gleamed in the center of what is now a cemetery for the dead killed in a ferocious attack. What sense does it make?”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Bone: Dying into Life (2000), p. 94

Love , Game , Sense , Dead

“The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us. They were brought here in chains and held in the communities where they are now chiefly found by a cruel slave code. Happily for both races, they are now free. They have from a standpoint of ignorance and poverty—which was our shame, not theirs—made remarkable advances in education and in the acquisition of property. They have as a people shown themselves to be friendly and faithful toward the white race under temptations of tremendous strength. They have their representatives in the national cemeteries, where a grateful Government has gathered the ashes of those who died in its defense. They have furnished to our Regular Army regiments that have won high praise from their commanding officers for courage and soldierly qualities and for fidelity to the enlistment oath. In civil life they are now the toilers of their communities, making their full contribution to the widening streams of prosperity which these communities are receiving. Their sudden withdrawal would stop production and bring disorder into the household as well as the shop. Generally they do not desire to quit their homes, and their employers resent the interference of the emigration agents who seek to stimulate such a desire.”

Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901) American politician, 23rd President of the United States (in office from 1889 to 1893)

First State of the Union Address (1889)

Life , People , Education , Faith

“So how do you do it?
With just words and just music
Capture the feeling
That my earth is somebody's ceiling
Can I deliver in sound
The weight of the ground
of a cemetery
in the center of Queens”

Sara Bareilles (1979) American pop rock singer-songwriter and pianist

"Chasing the Sun"
Lyrics, The Blessed Unrest (2013)

Music , Feeling

“Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe’s children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

2000s, Speech at the Four Seasons, New York (25 September 2008)

Children , People , Home , Boy

“In certain tantric rituals the candidate is first beaten by his guru, hashish forced down him, and he is taken at midnight to a dark cemetery for sacred sexual intercourse. Thus he achieves union with his god.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: Liber Null & Psychonaut (1987), p. 35

God

“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter I: The Prison Door

Happiness

“A cemetery is an affront to the rational mind. One reason is its eerily wasted space, this tribute to the dead that inevitably degenerates into ancestor worship as, on birthdays and anniversaries, humans of every faith and no faith at all brave whatever weather may that day threaten, in order to stand before these rows of silent stone markers, praying, yes, and remembering, of course, but very often actually speaking to the deceased, an oddly pagan ritual in which we engage, this shared pretense that the rotted corpses in warped wooden boxes are able to hear and understand us if we stand before their graves.The other reason a cemetery appeals to the irrational side is its obtrusive, irresistible habit of sneaking past the civilized veneer with which we cover the primitive planks of our childhood fears. When we are children, we know that what our parents insist is merely a tree branch blowing in the wind is really the gnarled fingertip of some horrific creature of the night, waiting outside the window, tapping, tapping, tapping, to let us know that, as soon as our parents close the door and sentence us to the gloom which they insist builds character, he will lift the sash and dart inside and…And there childhood imagination usually runs out, unable to give shape to the precise fears that have kept us awake and that will, in a few months, be forgotten entirely. Until we next visit a cemetery, that is, when, suddenly, the possibility of some terrifying creature of the night seems remarkably real.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 50, Again Old Town, I

Children , Fear , Faith , Imagination

“I knew I was destined for London, so I came to live with my nan in her council flat. It was the summer after my A-levels. Got a job in Willesden cemetery. I was getting a man’s wage, filling in graves. Stood around while they did the last rites. Cut the grass. A lot of the time I’d just sit on the gravestones and read and write. Scribbling away.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

The Sunday Times, May 16, 2006
Britain

Grass , Time , Reading , Summer

“We were outside. The icy wind whipped my face. I was constantly biting my lips so that they wouldn't freeze. All around me, what appeared to be a dance of death. My head was reeling. I was walking through a cemetery. Among the stiffened corpses, there were logs of wood. Not a sound of distress, not a plaintive cry, nothing but mass agony and silence. Nobody asked anyone for help. One died because one had to. No point in making trouble.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Death , Silence , Appearance , Help

“The young people of Germany have no problem with Judaism. I too, with my two sons sometimes walk across the Jewish cemetery in Oggersheim.”

Helmut Kohl (1930–2017) former chancellor of West Germany (1982-1990) and then the united Germany (1990-1998)

Die jungen Leute in Deutschland haben kein Problem mit dem Judentum. Ich gehe ja auch manchmal mit meinen beiden Jungs über den jüdischen Friedhof in Oggersheim.
In Tel Aviv in front of 900 Israelian politicians (January 1983)

People , Problem

“True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked "Unknown," and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in "honoring the memory" of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical.”

Ambrose Bierce book A Bivouac of the Dead

A Bivouac of the Dead, The New York American, November 22, 1903

Thinking , Memory

“I went to the Rayburn Building the other day on trifling business. It was an appalling experience. I had forgotten how preposterous the thing is with its pretentious megatonnage of rock and steel spreading acre after acre down the slope of Capitol Hill in sullen defiance to eternity and man.
It dwarfs the forum of the Caesars. Mussolini would have wept in envy.
Inside, one is compelled to dwell upon the insignificance of humanity. Not a single tiny wisp of beauty, nothing that is graceful, or charming, or eccentric, or human presents itself to the senses. Trying to imagine Clay and Webster in this celebration to the death of the spirit, erected to the glory that was Congress, is an exercise in comic despair.
What do we have? Banks of stainless-steel elevators. Miracles of plumbing. Corridors of cemetery marble stretching to far horizons under the most artificial light millions of dollars can create, a light that abides no shadow, grants no privacy, tolerates nothing that is interesting in the slightest degree.
Occasionally a small figure appeared in the distance, grew larger, then larger, then assumed human proportion, then passed and became smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Two ants had passed in a pyramid.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Moods of Washington" (p.36)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

Death , Beauty , Exercises , Imagination

“Mr. Lévesque was saying that part of my name was Elliott and since Elliot was an English name, it was perfectly understandable that I was for the No side, because, really, you see, I was not as much of a Quebecer as those who are going to vote Yes. That, my dear friends, is what contempt is…. It means saying that the Quebecers on the No side are not as good Quebecers as the others and perhaps they have a drop or two of foreign blood, while the people on the Yes side have pure blood in their veins.… Of course my name is Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Yes, Elliott was my mother's name. It was the name borne by the Elliotts who came to Canada more than 200 years ago. It is the name of the Elliotts who, more than 100 years ago, settled in Saint-Gabriel de Brandon, where you can still see their graves in the cemetery. That is what the Elliotts are. My name is a Quebec name — but my name is a Canadian name also.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Speech in Paul Sauvé Arena, Montreal, Quebec, six days before the Quebec referendum on independence. (14 May 1980)

People , Understanding , Parting

“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, France (23 January 1967), quoted in The New York Times (24 January 1967), p. 12.
Prime Minister

Change

“Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.”

Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995) Israeli politician, statesman and general

1994 Nobel Peace Prize lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1994/rabin-lecture.html (10 December 1994)

Life , World , Failure

“People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 27 : Evolution of a Vestryman
Context: The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.

People , Books , Reality

“I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out of life. It is one big railroad station—with all the people taking tickets for the best cemeteries.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 7

Life , Hate , People , Beauty

“If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

As quoted in Baseball as I Have Known It (1977) by Fred Lieb, p. 154
Context: If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery. I have the same violent temper my father and older brother had. Both died of injuries from street fights in Baltimore, fights begun by flare-ups of their tempers.

“The fence around a cemetery is foolish, for those inside can't get out and those outside don't want to get in.”

Артур Бризбейн (1864–1936)

“A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.”

Francois Mauriac (1885–1970) French author

World , Dead

“Let no one argue against this that we are living in a different century, that much water has flowed under the bridge and that our problems are no longer the same. We are discussing living water which has not yet flowed away. We are familiar with enough historical examples, beginning with that of Spinoza, where men have worked ferociously to wall up for ever and bury deep in the earth sources which were made to quench their thirsts, but which their fear will not tolerate. For nearly a century academic philosophy has buried Marx in the earth of silence, the earth of the cemetery.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (1968), Part One: From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy
A - F, Louis Althusser

Silence , Problem , Water , Fear

“They are hideous Golgothas, these old intermural cemeteries of ours. In other cities cemeteries are beautiful with all that the art of the gardener and sculptor can give....There the horror is masked. Here it glares at us with empty sockets. The tombs are fissured, or have caved in, or have crumbled down into shapeless bricks and mortar...[and] crawfish undermine the walls to feast upon what is hidden within.”

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) writer

Lafcadio Hearn, Creole Sketches, ed. Charles Woodward Hutsun (1880; Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1924), p. 136. Lafcadio Hearn referring to the cemeteries in New Orleans.

Beauty , Art

“If I could look back and appreciate our forefathers, I would thank them for being orderly in burying the same people of the same lineage in one cemetery -Edy kasawuli”

Edykasawuli7

People