Graveyards Quotes

The greatest loss is the lost of life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible. ~ Mark Twain

It's more eerie to be alone in a city that's lit up and functioning than one that's a tomb. If everything were silent, one could almost pretend to be in nature. A forest. A meadow. Crickets and birdsong. But the corpse of civilization is as restless as the creatures that now roam the graveyards. ~ Isaac Marion

Most people say about graveyards: "Oh, it's just a bunch of dead people. It's creepy." But for me, there's an energy to it that it not creepy, or dark. It has a positive sense to it. ~ Tim Burton

Jason Todd: Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me. But why? Why on God's Earth is HE still alive? Ignoring what he's done in the past. Blindly, stupidly, disregarding the entire graveyards he's filled, the thousands who have suffered, the friends he's crippled. You know, I thought... I thought I'd be the last person you'd ever let him hurt. If it had been you he beat to a bloody pulp, if he had taken you from this world, I would've done nothing but search the planet for this pathetic pile of evil death-worshiping garbage and sent him off to Hell.
Bruce: You don't understand. I don't think you've ever understood.
Jason: What? What, your moral code just won't allow for that? It's too hard to cross that line?
Bruce: No! God almighty, no. It'd be too damned easy. All I've ever wanted to do is kill him. But if I do that... if I allow myself to go down into that place... I'll never come back.
Jason: Why? I'm not talking about killing Penguin, or Scarecrow, or Dent. I'm talking about him. Just him. And doing it because... because he took me away from you. ~ Judd Winick

In your twenties, you expect to accumulate a graveyard's worth of failed romances. But what you don't count on is having to bury so many treasured friendships alongside them. ~ Ryan O'Connell

At about the age of ten, my friends and I discovered the joys of sitting in graveyards drinking merrydown cider and kissing and stealing our elder siblings' records. ~ Beth Orton

It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten. ~ Christopher Hitchens

As we go on with our lives we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed. ~ Charles Bukowski

Spirits have cravings
they're only human (well, some of them are)
but the amazing thing about these cravings is that they are SLIMMING POSITIVE! That's right, spirits don't crave sugary foods, or fat, or chocolate, or deep-fried carbs. They crave HEALTHY food like raw liver and bugs and those tiny dried-up foods you find in old attics and the better-stocked graveyards. ~ Chris Dolley

I see you go bare-shod. This is most likely extremely sensible. Shoes are no end of trouble for girls ... How many have danced to death in slippers of silk and glass and fur and wood? Too many to count - the graveyards, they are so full these days. You are very wise to let your soles become grubby with mud, to let them grow their own slippers of moss and clay and calluses. This is far preferable to shoes which may become wicked at any moment. ~ Catherynne M Valente

The hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard. ~ Ted Chiang

sooner or later the graveyards are full of everybody ~ Terry Pratchett

I write simply because I hear voices of people in my head who won't give me peace until I convey their stories to the rest of the world. Seriously. They've always been with me. While other girls played with dolls, and my brothers with Hot Wheels, I was busy traveling through space or traipsing through graveyards with my imaginary playmates. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Graveyards were usually, in his team's experience, a bad idea. This one was full of greenish lights that danced between the graves, and there were a couple of swaying figures, one an emaciated husk with glowing eyes who had taken to ... yes, there he was again this morning, like every morning.
Quill tiredly raised his hand to return the wave. ~ Paul Cornell

Prepare for a radio, for nothing is silent like the grave ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Rosehill was shady and beautiful, the most serene place I could imagine. It had been closed to the public for years, and sometimes as I wandered alone - and often lonely - through the lush fern beds and long curtains of silvery moss, I pretended the crumbling angels were wood nymphs and fairies and I their ruler, queen of my own graveyard kingdom. ~ Amanda Stevens

And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He his in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards and its low-lying rivers. Or just a house - solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it. ~ Toni Morrison

Truth be told, Victor didn't care for graveyards, either. He didn't like dead people, mostly because he had no effect on them. Sydney, conversely, didn't like dead people because she had such a marked effect on them. ~ Victoria Schwab

With fame, money and sex settled, he had to find something else to fight, and like any honorable man he chose to fight his own people. And that was how Byron the sentimental poet of graveyards and lost loves became the Satanic joker all England loved to hate. ~ John C. Dolan

It is far better to be happy than to have our bodies act as graveyards to animals. ~ Clement Of Alexandria

When you leave the desires behind, you will find the graveyards ahead! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

you said,
"your bones belong in museums"
i said,
"when you kiss me,
fireworks electrocute my spine"
my mother is dying and doesn't play piano anymore,
i tell my mailman about how he should try pecan pie,
when at the supermarket, i always forget about eggs,

i've started collecting paintings,
i go to little art shows all around New York City
and introduce myself as "Rose"
when strange boys stare at my lips, i kiss
them,
i chew poetry and forget to leave tips,
i order wine and leave flowers at graveyards
that don't have any,
when my father calls, i do not answer

everything you say reminds me of brown tangerines,
i want to spill this poem inside of you

i work as a stewardess and the first thing they
teach you is how to respond when someone asks
you to take off your underwear

i wish i could say "sure thing fella, let me wrap it
around your throat until you turn purple"

but instead it's "if there's anything else, please let me
know"

and so when you called, the only thing i could say was
if there's anything else,
please let me
know ~ Irynka

Not only are we digital immigrants, we are also media dinosaurs. We enjoy thumbing through glossy magazines, and maybe still subscribe to a daily newspaper. We schedule at least one evening per week around a favorite TV program, created by one of the major television or cable networks. We can name at least one local or national news anchor. And scattered around our homes and offices are veritable graveyards of physical media - old tapes, vinyl records, floppy disks, and magazines - that we insist on keeping, even though we'll probably never use them again. ~ Ian Lamont

Every hundred years or so a new Grim Anoukie is made; the Parish Priest at the time picks a victim, usually someone who has pissed off the church or simply wouldn't be missed. He then buries them alive in the Virgin Grave; the rest is... history."

Nicky Peacock
"The Virgin Grave ~ Nicky Peacock

Graveyards are filled with books that were never written, songs that were never sung, words that were never spoken, things that were never done. ~ Mark Victor Hansen

Some people have beautiful gardens inside their hearts, some have graveyards. ~ Nitya Prakash

I used to be very afraid of graveyards and death and such things, but not anymore. There is just no sense of being afraid when you live so near the graves; it would be like the tongue fearing the teeth. ~ NoViolet Bulawayo

it may be worth while to note again how often finely developed skulls are discovered in the graveyards of old monasteries, and how likely seems Galtons conjecture, that progress was arrested in the Middle Ages, because the celibacy of the clergy brought about the extinction of the best strains of blood. ~ John Beddoe

Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. ~ Richard Brautigan

When I was younger, I loved graveyards. They weren't spooky so much as mysterious. Each tombstone another story to uncover. Another life to learn about.
Now that I'm older - I won't say how old - I hate graveyards. The only life - or rather death - I see in the tombstones is my own. ~ Pseudonymous Bosch

What remains of the dead? What remains of every one of us?

Tombstones sink in, moss covers them, and after a few centuries the name can no longer be read. Every forgotten grave is designated a new corpse.

As the generations passed, remembrance of the dead diminished until it was forgotten. What was called everlasting peace only lasted half a century. The bones were disturbed as the graveyards were mulched in to suburbs.

The earth had become too small, for the living and the dead. In half a century a funeral had become a luxury that only few could afford who had died before judgment day. But who cares about a single body when the whole planet is dying.

[...]

Earlier the remains of humanity had only had the right to be there as long as the living remembered them. A human being remembers their relatives, their friends and colleagues. But his conscience only reached back three generations before it faded away. Just more then fifty years.

With the same ease, you let the picture of our grandfather or your friend from school out of our conscience into absolute nothingness. The memories of a human can last longer than the bones, but as soon as the last one who remembered us has passed we dissolve with time.

[...]

Back then there was almost no more space in the thick family album for old and brown turned pictures, but almost nobody that looked through it could say for sure who was on the photos. ~ Dmitry Glukhovsky

In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed treeless patch of green known as "No Man's Land." Here 1,500 unidentified bodies are buried. At one time, their skin burned with yellow fever; now they lie in a cool, dark place where long ago their arms and legs, hands and feet, were intertwined for eternity. ~ Molly Caldwell Crosby

Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however. ~ Mark Twain

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards. ~ Samuel Beckett

War serves only the warlords and the graveyards! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Putting a body in a box as a keepsake for mortals to cling to long after everything that was that person is gone - it turns my stomach. Graveyards are for the living, not the dead. ~ Heather Brewer

I've always considered music stores to be the graveyards of musicians. ~ Gary Larson

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wall Street's graveyards are filled with men who were right too soon. ~ William Peter Hamilton

Alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills. ~ Charles Bukowski

Where do they go when they die? We hear of the elephant graveyards, where the elephants go to die, but how much more curious it is that birds are not falling out of the sky all the time, on our heads, at our feet, dying and falling and flopping to the ground. I rarely see a dead bird on the ground. ~ Sophy Burnham

A crowd of men stood in front of them. Of all ages, with expressions of sex-wonder in their eyes, gazing curiously as men who cannot solve a mystery that populates graveyards and through the ages has sent poets, popes, kings and fools to the junk heap. ~ Jim Tully

What once made our hearts burn until we thought we would either die or kill someone ... all that is less than the dust the wind blows across the graveyards.
When we demand fidelity are we wishing for the other person's happiness? ... And if we dont love the person in a way that makes her happy, do we have the right to expect fidelity or any other?! ~ Sandor Marai

It is one of the many graveyards which are the Great War's chief heritage. The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless plains of Picardy and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter. ~ John Keegan

You guys used to walk through graveyards?" Iona asked, horrified.
"It cut at least ten minutes off the walk to Tesco," Harriet tried to reason.
"I am so glad I go to Uni in the city," Iona said, shaking her head. "A Tesco Metro on every second corner."
"And a Sainsbury's Local on all the others," Adam joked. ~ Erin Lawless

If you don't write your books, there will be graveyards full of children.
(LDStorymakers Conference, May 2015) ~ Brandon Mull

I wanted to be with the men I admired rather than the Scottish Arts Council crowd, so I spent a lot of time in graveyards. You get less trouble from the dead. ~ Alexander Stoddart

I could give you children," said Jack, sounding faintly affronted. "You'd have to tell me how many heads you wanted them to have, and what species you'd like them to be, but what's the point of having all these graveyards if I can't give you children when you ask for them? ~ Seanan McGuire

A country which prefers guns to flowers will live the beauty of the flowers only in its graveyards! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death. ~ Garrett Leigh

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."
"What do we want?" I asked blurrily.
"Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted."
"What was that?"
He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said. ~ Michael Cunningham

There were people dying everywhere getting massacred in every town and village, there were people being picked up and thrown into dark jails in unknown parts, there were dungeons in the city where hundreds of young men were kept in heavy chains and from where many never emerged alive, there were thousands who had disappeared leaving behind women with photographs and perennial waiting ,there were multitudes of dead bodies on the roads, in hospital beds, in fresh martyrs' graveyards and scattered casually on the snow of mindless borders. ~ Mirza Waheed

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality. ~ Robert Smithson

Only the most extraordinary men can choose the remote cliffs as their graveyards; others are always condemned to nearby city gardens! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

When Harper was in among the stones she could see brass plaques screwed into the towering pillars of granite. One listed the names of seventeen boys who had died in the mud of eastern France during the First World War. Another listed the names of thirty-four boys who had died on the beaches of western France during the Second. Harper thought all tombstones should be this size, that the small blocks to be found in most graveyards did not even begin to express the sickening enormity of losing a virgin son, thousands of miles away, in the muck and cold. You needed something so big you felt it might topple over and crush you. ~ Joe Hill

Witches cackle.
Goblins growl.
Spectres boo,
And werewolves howl.
Black cats hiss.
Bats flap their wings.
Mummies moan.
The cold wind sings.
Ogre's roar.
And crows, they caw.
Vampires bahahahaha.
Warlocks swish their moonlit capes.
Loch Ness monsters churn the lake.
Skeletons, they rattle bones
While graveyards crack the old headstones.
All the while the ghouls, they cry
To trick-or-treaters passing by.
Oh, the noise on Halloween;
It makes me want to scream! ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

My body weeps to live
when you make me believe
that someday I will be dead
soul sleepless in graveyard's bed ~ Munia Khan

Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb...and find them to our liking. ~ Thomas Ligotti

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs. ~ Susan Hill

Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour. ~ Ivan Klima

Graveyards were the one place Belladonna never saw ghosts. ~ Helen Stringer

Visit the graveyards sometimes and read the headstone epitaphs! There is much to learn from the dark face of the life! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Ignoring what he's done in the past. Blindly, stupidly, disregarding the entire graveyards he's filled, the thousands who have suffered... the friends he's crippled... I thought... I thought killing me--that I'd be the last person you'd ever let him hurt. If it had been you that he beat to a bloody mass. If it had been you that he left in agony. If he had taken you from this world... I would have done nothing but search the planet for this pathetic pile of evil, death-worshiping garbage... and sent him off to hell. ~ Judd Winick

There are bones
waiting for names in the graveyards.
Even the sun above us is dying, one
landed repetition of light at a time. ~ Cecilia Llompart

I stopped looking at the cars after the first few miles. Once I started to see past the exteriors, I saw what lay inside some of them and felt the urge to sprint to the nearest freeway exit. Some people had tried to outrun The Plague by leaving town. They hadn't realized the illness could still find them in their cars, and now the 405 was one of the largest graveyards in the world. I thought for a moment about all of the other cities across the globe that probably had scenes just like this. My eyes stung, wondering if my mother, my dad, or any of my friends were in similar graveyards.
I made the mistake of glancing into an overturned Volkswagen Beetle as I passed and saw a pair of legs clad in jeans and white Jack Purcell sneakers in the shadows of the car. They reminded me of Sarah's shoes. The man who laced those up that morning hadn't realized he wouldn't be taking them off again. ~ Kirby Howell

Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards. ~ Neil Kinnock

Caring too much is a one-way ticket to graveyards and good-byes. ~ Mary Elizabeth Summer

Nothing but great antiquity can make graveyards interesting to me. I have no friends there. ~ Henry David Thoreau