Gravestone Quotes

Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness. He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never 'been a greater botanist or zoologist', and that his system of classification was 'the greatest achievement in the realm of science'. Modestly, he suggested that his gravestone should bear the inscription Princeps Botanicorum, 'Prince of Botanists'. It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had weeds named after them. ~ Bill Bryson

The loss inside him kept piling - vertebrae shattered, finger bones lost, gravestone past and guillotine future, ghost woman and her ghost curls, ~ Ryan Graudin

Twilight drops her curtain down, and pins it with a star. ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery

When a child dies, a parent loses a part of themselves," he said. "Your whole world ceases to exist and you're nothing but a shell of the person you once were. Your mom has dealt with it in her way, me in mine, and you in yours." He lifted his hand off John's gravestone and rose. "Your mom hates the world, I avoid it, and you try to save it. ~ Nicole Williams

You better be very convinced, very sure, before you pull your plug or someone else's plug, that you know what's on the other side of the gravestone. ~ Joni Eareckson Tada

Pak Karman hugged his wife's gravestone tightly. "You left without saying farewell!" The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light. ~ Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

Harper said, "But Snuffleupagus was real."
"That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that. ~ Joe Hill

The last to fall were the buildings, distant and solemn, the gravestones for an entire world. ~ Dan Wells

I'm going to put on my gravestone, 'He never owned a cell phone.' ~ Jesse Ventura

Ron told Pippa that during the six years he had spent on the book, Valerie Chernow had developed a powerful identification with Hamilton's wife. "She used to say, 'Eliza is like me: She's good, she's true, she's loyal, she's not ambitious.' There was a purity and a goodness about the character, and that was like Valerie," he says. In 2006, after 27 years of marriage, Valerie passed away. For her gravestone, Ron chose a line from the letter that Hamilton wrote to Eliza on the night before the duel: "Best of wives and best of women. ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

[On being indecisive and changeable:] On my gravestone I want inscribed: 'On the other hand, maybe I should have lived. ~ Barbara Walters

My gravestone will say, 'Here Lies Damon Lindelof - Or Does He?' ~ Damon Lindelof

Anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth. ~ Michael Light

Sehun love Kai." he brushed his fingers on the gravestone. "Kai love Sehun."

"Sooooo much, Sehun... ~ FishMeAnEXo

Why should death make a man truthful, or even clever? The dead are likely dull fellows, full of tedious complaints - the ground's too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why does he get more worms than I do ... ~ George R R Martin

Sometimes I dream--"
"I'll put that on your gravestone. ~ Philip K. Dick

I hear a phone ringing through the thick fuzzy air. It's Thunders, asking me to join the Heartbreakers. He says to come over to the rehearsal studios right now. I'm scared but I go anyway. That should be written on my gravestone. She was scared. But she went anyway. ~ Viv Albertine

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

I have been approached now and again about sitcoms, but, with very few exceptions, one simply needs to move to L.A. for at least a year or two these days if one wants to develop a series - which is what writing a pilot means. I've also been approached about writing episodes for sitcoms, but in order to do that one actually has to watch sitcoms ... Life's too short for television, and I don't what it on my actual gravestone, HE STARED AT A BOX FOR 10,000 HOURS. ~ David Ives

I don't want an epitaph on my gravestone that says, 'He would have pursued some big dreams in his life, but other people wouldn't let him. ~ Tom Peters

I desire no other inscription over my gravestone than: 'Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800'. ~ John Adams

When I die, my epitaph or whatever you call those signs on gravestones is going to read: I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I dident like. I am so proud of that I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved. And when you come to my grave you will find me sitting there, proudly reading it. ~ Will Rogers

The fist of a revolutionist must be hard like a gravestone; if not, his own gravestone will soon be erected! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe. ~ Clifford D. Simak

Ivan had contrived somehow in the dark of night to replace every watermelon in the watermelon patch with a gravestone, and every gravestone in the engraver's lot with a watermelon ~ Kristin Cashore

My name is Scarlet Stone. I was offered useful traits the day I entered this world. I passed on common sense, opting for the-edge-of-a-knife journey. When I die, I want my gravestone to have the word 'epic' on it somewhere. ~ Jewel E. Ann

Steven Tyler isn't in Aerosmith anymore, but his gravestone will probably say something about Aerosmith. ~ Patrick Stump

Natalie was buried in the family plot, next to a gravestone that already bore her parents' names. I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it's the only way to truly keep your child. Kid grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground. ~ Gillian Flynn

Till the master of all good workmen shall set us to work anew. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Owen was so tiny, we loved to pick him up; in truth, we couldn't resist picking him up. We thought it was a miracle: how little he weighed. This was also incongruous because Owen came from a family in the granite business. The Meany Granite Quarry was a big place, the equipment for blasting and cutting the granite slabs was heavy and dangerous-looking; granite itself is such a rough, substantial rock. But the only aura of the granite quarry that clung to Owen was the granular dust, the gray powder that sprang off his clothes whenever we lifted him up. He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times - especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon). ~ John Irving

Rafe tugged her closer before she could trip over a gravestone. "Damn it, woman. Devil take your wagon! You fail to grasp the severity of this situation. ~ Brooklyn Ann

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone. ~ Carlos Fuentes

What do you get the man who has everything? Might I suggest a gravestone inscribed with the words: so what? ~ Simon Munnery

To what nadir of paltriness , pettiness, and squalor a man can sink! How could he change so! But is this really true to life? ---It is, it's all true to life, for anything can happen to a man. Your ardent youth of today would recoil in horror if you were to show him his own portrait as an old man. Once you set off on life's journey, once you take your leave of those gentle years of youth and enter the harsh, embittering years of manhood, remember to keep with you all your human emotions, do not leave them by the wayside, for you will not pick them up again! Grim and terrible is the old age which awaits us, and nothing does it give in return! The grave itself is more merciful than old age, for at least on the gravestone you will find written the words: 'Here a man lies buried!' but in the cold, unfeeling features of inhuman old age you can read nothing. ~ Nikolai Gogol

A rose covered the top portion of the gravestone and underneath it read: Once your eyes have been opened, you can't un-know or un-see. ~ Rose Pressey

How unfortunate it is to be constrained by what people might say at our funeral or on our gravestone. ~ Lawrence Fagg

They will put that on my gravestone. 'Here lies Tinker, her heart was in the right place, but her foot was in her mouth and god knows where her brain went. ~ Wen Spencer

The first shall be last and the last shall be first, ~ Killah Priest

When you die in a hundred years, they'll probably write on your gravestone, 'Here Lies Harper Price - Damn It, She Still Had Stuff to Do! ~ Rachel Hawkins

He'd seen a lot of bizarre items left at gravesides, like a carton of eggs, a pair of reading glasses, a bag of licorice, smooth stones, a spoon. ~ Sheri Webber

The power of the artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, a form concerned with argument and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone-and you'll be made shinier, brighter, by it. In this form it will-and therefore you will-avoid destruction by war, history, time generally; it'll even keep you alive after death; in fact it'll form a place for you to live, not die, where you'll be seen in the eyes of and the context of this love right to the end of time. ~ Ali Smith

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space. ~ Mary Roach

Social media is basically standing at a bucket filled with other people's vomit and you suck the vomit through a straw, and gag and wince at the unbearable taste of other people's vomit. Yet strangely we continue to suck through the straw as if we've never tasted such lovely vomit. And then before you know it you're old and you're grey. And that's the end of you. A lonely death. Your gravestone is marked with the six saddest words:

Social Media Drained My Soul Away

And they all mourn your loss at a budget funeral service while updating their social media statuses on mobile phones apps. And in years to come nobody remembers any of your updates; even those updates that you deep-down believed were going to bring about world peace. The Digital Age is more disposable than nappies and just as full of shit. ~ Rupert Dreyfus

Parvaneh's belly is now so big that she looks like a giant tortoise when she heaves herself down into a squatting position, one hand on the gravestone and the other hooked around Patrick's arm. Not that Ove dares bring up the giant tortoise metaphor, of course. There are more pleasant ways of killing oneself, he feels. ~ Fredrik Backman

I don't want to have a gravestone. I want to have all my friends burn me and then snort the ashes. I think that's the only way to go out. ~ Marilyn Manson

Let love be the gravestone
Lying on my life. ~ Anna Akhmatova

If I go to a baseball game, I hear 'Shoeless Joe,' but otherwise, I hear 'toe pick' five times a day. No matter how many more movies I make, that'll be on my gravestone. ~ D. B. Sweeney

Cast a cold eye
on life, on death
Horseman pass by ~ W.B.Yeats

He remembered the gravestone of a woman parishioner in the churchyard of St. John's in the Grove. DEMURE AT LAST, it read. He thought that the single most definitive and amusing epitaph he'd ever come across. ~ Jan Karon

He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man's child sees the full stop at the end of the sentence. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Αἰσχύλον Εὐφορίωνος Ἀθηναῖον τόδε κεύθει
μνῆμα καταφθίμενον πυροφόροιο Γέλας·
ἀλκὴν δ' εὐδόκιμον Μαραθώνιον ἄλσος ἂν εἴποι
καὶ βαθυχαιτήεις Μῆδος ἐπιστάμενο
This gravestone covers Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, from Athens, who died in fertile Gela. The field of Marathon will speak of his bravery, and so will the long haired Mede who knew it well. ~ Aeschylus

The Doctor: Amy, what are you doing?
Amy: That gravestone, Rory's, there's room for one more name isn't there?
The Doctor: What are you talking about? Back away from the Angel. Come back to the TARDIS, we'll figure something out.
Amy: The Angel, would it send me back to the same time, to him?
The Doctor: I don't know. Nobody knows.
Amy: But it's my best shot, yeah?
The Doctor: No!
River: Doctor, shut up! Yes, yes, it is!
The Doctor: Amy -
Amy: Well then. I just have to blink, right?
The Doctor: No!
Amy: It'll be fine. I know it will. I'll be with him like I should be. Me and Rory together. {calling River over} Melody.
The Doctor: Stop it! Just, just, stop it!

Amy: You look after him. And you be a good girl and you look after him.
The Doctor: You are creating fixed time. I will never be able to see you again.
Amy: I'll be fine. I'll be with him.
The Doctor: Amy. Please. Just come back into the TARDIS, Come along, Pond. Please.
Amy: Raggedy Man, goodbye.

-Doctor Who ~ Steven Moffat

Susan Alexie died of tuberculosis on August 30, 1945. I don't know why the exact date of her death is not on her gravestone. Perhaps it had been about money. Those extra letters and numbers might have been too expensive. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I could write "I don't know" one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate. ~ Sherman Alexie

Words, so much more readily remembered, gradually replace our past with their own. Our birth pangs become pages. Our battles, our triumphs, our trophies, our stubbed toes, will survive only in their descriptions; because it is the gravestone we visit, when we visit, not the grave. It is against the stone we stand our plastic flowers. Who wishes to bid good morrow to a box of rot and bones? We say a name, and only a faint simulacrum of its object forms itself (if any at all does)- forms itself in that grayless gray area of consciousness where we put imaginary maps and once heard music; where we hunt for lost articles and diagram desire. ~ William H Gass

Somebody asked what I wanted on my gravestone. I'm just going to put: 'Glad I Could Help.' ~ Dick Van Dyke

I think they'll probably put that on my gravestone. 'He Was Heterosexual and Had Low Expectations. ~ Cassandra Clare

The three of them left the noodle shop and went to a nearby love hotel. It was on the edge of town, on a street where love hotels alternated with gravestone dealers. ~ Haruki Murakami

I went up to his gravestone and repeated what the others had done: I placed a pebble on his tomb and silently said to him:

'Well, Oskar, at last we meet again, but this is not the time for reproaches and complaints. It would not be fair to you or to me. Now you are in another world, in eternity, and I can no longer ask you all those questions to which in life you would have given evasive replies... and death is the best evasion of all. I have received no answer, my dear, I do not know why you abandoned me... But what not even your death or my old age can change is that we are still married, this is how we are before God. I have forgiven you everything, everything...'

Murmuring these words, I let them push my wheelchair up the slight incline leading to the gravestone that marks the place where his remains are laid to rest, outside the Jewish cemetery of Jerusalem. I knew that somehow the power of my thoughts had reached him, and felt, after all those years, a strange inner peace filling my spirit. ~ Emilie Schindler

I thought of the new stone, of my new wife, and of the newly buried white bones beneath us, and I felt that fate had made sport of us all. ~ Soseki Natsume

How could you leave me?' she cried out loud, scrambling up onto her feet. Her voice sounded ugly and guttural to her ears, and she did not feel like herself. She wanted to kick the gravestone; she wanted to tear out the earth beneath which her mother lay and pull the body out of the ground and shake it until it gave her an answer. She fell to the ground again and dug her fingers into the winter-hard earth, scrabbling at the soil until her fingers began to bleed. The ground would not come up. It was frozen. Her mother was dead. ~ Malinda Lo

That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that. Harper ~ Joe Hill

It is a terrible moment when you realise you'll never do all the best things this world can offer; that you'll never have a superlative experience. You'll go to a Gala Bingo rather than Vegas; get your own office, but not be a CEO; and get a gravestone, but not in Poet's Corner. You'll never sleep with the girls on the TV. And all of this mediocrity was made worse by the fact of its inescapable prevalence. ~ Django Wylie

When you're gone would you rather have your gravestone say, 'He never missed a meeting.' Or one that said, 'He was a great father.' ~ Steve Blank

They'll probably put that on my gravestone. 'He Was Heterosexul and Had Low Expectations. ~ Jace Herondale

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote:
"I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it's on booze or women or movies."
Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth.
I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America.
I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America.
I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & i ~ Dan Rather

If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon-I don't want it! But I am not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life as a whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"
"Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy!"
"Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light-"
"Don't be propertarian," Takver muttered.
"Dear heart, don't cry."
"I'm not crying. You are. Those are your tears."
"I'm cold. The moonlight's cold."
"Lie down."
A great shiver went through his body as she took him in her arms.
"I'm afraid, Tak ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness ~ Maggie Nelson

The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Three years earlier her father had been buried (irritable and impatient as he always had been) in the Fladstrand Church cemetery that bordered the lovely park, Plantagen, which shared with the cemetery its trees, shared its beech and ash and maple, in the same plot where her mother, wide eyed and confused, had lain down almost willingly two years before, where her brother had lain for thirty-five years, dazed and unwillingly after too short a life.
A dove was looking down from atop the family gravestone. It was made from metal so it could not fly away, but sometimes it went missing all the same and only a spike would remain. Someone had taken that dove, someone out there maybe had an entire collection of doves and angels and other small, Christian bronze sculptures in a cupboard at home and on long evenings would close the curtains and take them out and run his fingers gently over the smooth, cold bodies. ~ Per Petterson

A young man left Beartown in silence and when he came home again it was too late for words. You can't look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness. ~ Fredrik Backman

It is upon such stones that men attempt to permanently etch history so they will not exist in a vacuum; it is the final statement after a lifetime of scratching out divisions upon the ground, over ephemeral time itself, merely to give their short journeys meaning, to tell others "I was here – do not forget me, do not let my brief blast dissolve into nothingness. ~ Rob Bignell

Ove brushes the snow off the gravestone. Digs determinedly into the frozen ground and carefully replenishes the flowers. He stands up, dusts himself off, and looks helplessly at her name, feeling ashamed of himself. He who always used to nag at her about being late. Now he stands here himself, apparently quite incapable of following her as he'd planned. ~ Fredrik Backman

In my life are many windows
and many graves.
Sometimes they exchange
roles:
then a window is closed forever,
then by way of a gravestone
I can see
very far.
(Hebrew-to-English translation by Rabbi Steven Sager) ~ Yehuda Amichai

I think of myself as a comforter. That's what i want on my gravestone. ~ Charlie Price

Weep not for me, my friends so dear.
I am not dead, just sleeping here.
My grassy bed, my grave you see.
Prepare in life to follow me.
-Zee, off a gravestone ~ Leander Watts

O summer day beside the joyous sea!
O summer day so wonderful and white,
So full of gladness and so full of pain!
Forever and forever shalt thou be
To some the gravestone of a dead delight,
To some the landmark of a new domain. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I often thought my gravestone would say, 'Here lies Gandalf. He came out,' ~ Ian McKellen

You know what I'm going to have on my gravestone? 'She did it the hard way.' ~ Bette Davis

Without You"

My Pillow gazes upon me at night
Empty as a gravestone;
I never thought it would be so bitter
To be alone,
Not to lie down asleep in your hair.

I lie alone in a silent house,
The hanging lamp darkened,
And gently stretch out my hands
To gather in yours,
And softly press my warm mouth
Toward you, and kiss myself, exhausted and weak-
Then suddenly I'm awake
And all around me the cold night grows still.
The star in the window shines clearly-
Where is your blond hair,
Where your sweet mouth?

Now I drink pain in every delight
And poison in every wine;
I never knew it would be so bitter
To be alone,
Alone, without you. ~ Hermann Hesse

Write on my gravestone: 'Infidel, Traitor.', infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people. ~ Wendell Phillips

There is no such thing as a happy ending. Every culture has a maxim that makes this point, while nowhere in the Universe is there a single gravestone that reads 'He Loved Everything About His Life, Especially the Dying Bit at the End'. ~ Eoin Colfer

Calzada de Calatrava, as Almadovar's brother once put it, 'is the sort of place where people spend their whole life saving for a decent gravestone in the cemetery. ~ Giles Tremlett

But I think I want to become part of Scotland when I die. In a coffin, you just turn to dust, so I would prefer to be buried in a wicker casket, or in a sheet like the Africans do, so that I actually become part of the earth. I would like a tree to be planted on top of me.

And I told my wife Pamela a long time ago the epitaph that I want on my gravestone: Jesus Christ, is that the time already?
Failing that, I would like an epitaph in writing so tiny that visitors would have to inch right next to my gravestone to read it. It would say: You're standing on my balls. ~ Billy Connolly

Carefully, she stands. And she runs her hand across the top of Thomasina's gravestone as she leaves, like how, as girls, they would let go of hands - gradually, moving their fingertips over each other's palms, as gently as raindrops. She has done this for sixty-eight years and there is a dip on the stone from this. She has worn the stone down with her loving goodbyes. ~ Susan Fletcher

And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn. ~ Oscar Wilde

I always tell my wife, 'If you're ever looking for something to put on my gravestone, put down, 'He was an honest man, and he never held a grudge.' ~ Doug Harvey

(On his gravestone): "I told you I was ill". ~ Spike Milligan

The inscription on his gravestone had felt so wholly insufficient the moment she saw it. Just a name and dates, carved by machine. Just the inadequate and impersonal. Loving Father and Husband, like every other headstone there, whether it was true or not. This was the tasteful way to do it, she knew, even though it showed none of the true shape of the man ~ Stuart Nadler

I notice young girls picking flowers off her gravestone; their clean hearts are soapstone. Their small sorrows are for children alone. And all of their stories will never be told. ~ Nicholaus Patnaude

On my gravestone, I want 'Here lies the singer,' not 'Here lies the T.V. presenter'. ~ Cilla Black

If privacy had a gravestone it might read: 'Don't Worry. This Was for Your Own Good. ~ John Twelve Hawks

Epitaphs for a gravestone: 'Please: no hooliganism'; or 'Es prohibe se hace agua aqui'; or 'No comment'. ~ Edward Abbey