Inscriptions On Headstones Quotes

Excavations at Ai Khanoum on the northern border of modern Afghanistan have produced great quantities of Greek inscriptions and even the remnants of a philosophical treatise originally on papyrus. One of the most interesting is the base of a dedication by one Klearchos, perhaps the known student of Aristotle, that records his bringing to this new Greek city, Alexandria on the Oxus, the traditional maxims from the shrine of Apollo at Delphi concerning the five ages of man:

In childhood, seemliness
In youth, self-control
In middle age, justice
In old age, wise council
In death, painlessness ~ Robin Lane Fox

ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF D-Day, I was broadcasting from the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, one of the bloodiest battlefields in American history. The cemetery is at once haunting and beautiful, with 9,386 white marble headstones in long, even lines across the manicured fields of dark green, each headstone marking the death of a brave young American. The anniversary was a somber and celebratory ~ Tom Brokaw

There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic
a "damn, fool math"
in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery in Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.
At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. ~ Karen Russell

Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid. ~ Alexander Smith

Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual." ~ Soren Kierkegaard

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. ~ James Joyce

I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and ... I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them ... not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books. ~ Laini Taylor

This isn't how it should be, God.

Thousands of graves marking thousands of lives--so much focus on death. Did the gravediggers spend their lives just serving the dead? How many Numbers ticked away for the sake of carving headstones no one would read?

As I stare at this scene, I decide I don't want a headstone when I die. I don't even want to be buried. I want to disappear--save that chunk of earth for people to live on. This land I stand on is worthless now. No one can build a house here. No one can plant gardens or start a new village. Is that what the people buried beneath me would have wanted?

Earth wasn't intended to hold only dead bodies.

I stand. God, I need to live. ~ Nadine Brandes

At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifully illustrated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed, "To Rachel, from Daddy." The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off. Then it dawned on me - both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl. I had always remembered the books and our father's dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, "The only paradise is paradise lost. ~ Mira Bartok

As she searched, she looked down at the fallen architecture and read the names graffitied on its sides. Gracus loves Lucinda. Ethan loves Sarah. Michael loves Erin. For what seemed like days she ran her fingers over the names carved into the fragmented bones of ruined loves, stepping around the broken pillars of unkept vows and dusting headstones in the graveyard of love with her hands. Every kind of death had a resting place in the dry lands.
She walked until her feet bled. ~ Josephine Angelini

On not crowding another person in a relationship: Next time you're at a cemetary, look around at all the headstones. They're side by side. Even married couples. Nobody wants a plot on top of another person's plot. Why? ... Even when they're dead, people still love their own space. ~ Kristen Tracy

Till they arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that much thinner, harder to breathe. She had not understood, till she came to a place where it was lacking, the extent to which her sense of the world had to do with the presence of those who had been there before, leaving signs of their passing and spaces still warm with their breath - a threshold worn with the coming and going of feet, hedges between fields that went back a thousand years, and the names even further; most of all, the names on headstones, which were their names, under which lay the bones that had made their bones and given them breath. ~ David Malouf

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone. ~ Kim Edwards

It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament. ~ Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Can you remember, Acte ... how much easier our belief in Nero made life for us in the old days? And can you remember the paralysis, the numbness that seized the whole world when Nero died? Didn't you feel as if the world had grown bare and colorless all of a sudden? Those people on the Palatine have tried to steal our Nero from us, from you and me. Isn't splendid to think that we can show them they haven't succeeded? They have smashed his statues into splinters, erased his name from all the inscriptions, they even replaced his head on that huge statue in Rome with the peasant head of old Vespasian. Isn't it fine to teach them that all that hasn't been of the slightest use? Granted that they have been successful for a few years. For a few years they have actually managed to banish all imagination from the world, all enthusiasm, extravagance, everything that makes life worth living. But now, with our Nero, all these things are back again. ~ Lion Feuchtwanger

Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use ... At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said "Macondo" and another larger one on the main street that said "God exists". ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words) and on the main terms connecting them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best. The strategy is one of ascending to a common part of two fundamentally disparate conceptual schemes, the better to discuss the disparate foundations. No wonder it helps in philosophy. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge ~ Virginia Woolf

... She had been perfectly happy before she had met him; indeed she had been even slightly happier then. So the inscription might more accurately have read: "To remind you of how happy you've been in Edinburgh, in spite of the memories of me." But people never wrote that sort of brutally honest thing in books, largely because people very rarely have a clear idea of the effect that they have on other people, or can bring themselves to admit it. And Bruce, as Sally had discovered, lacked both insight into himself and an understanding of how somebody like her might feel about somebody like him ... ~ Alexander McCall Smith

If her eyes had no expression, it was probably because they had nothing to express. If she had few wrinkles, it was because her mind had never traced its name or any other inscription on her face. ~ Charles Dickens

A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, and committal read. But somehow the corpse never stays put. ~ Bernard Ramm

For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war.
[Funeral Oration of Pericles] ~ Thucydides

As life runs on, the road grows strange with faces new - and near the end. The milestones into headstones change, Neath every one a friend. ~ James Russell Lowell

When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning." ~ Simone De Beauvoir

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

Over the door of the library in Thebes is the inscription Medicine for the soul. ~ Diodorus Siculus

I found in one of the tombs an inscription saying, 'If you touch my tomb, you will be eaten by a crocodile and hippopotamus.' It doesn't mean the hippo will eat you, it means the person really wanted his tomb to be protected. ~ Zahi Hawass

George Harrison: The day after the Blue Angel audition, John showed up to rehearsal with a long list of name suggestions, and I remember each and every one of them: the Deads-men, the Deadmen, the Undeads-men, the Undeadmen, the Rots, the Rotters, the Dirts, the Dirty Ones, the Grayboys, the Eaten Brains, the Eating Brains, the Mersey Beaters, the Mersey Beaten, the Bloodless, the Graves, the Headstones, and the Liverpools of Blood. Paul ripped off John's right arm and used it to slap John across the face, then he said, Those're horrible, mate, just horrible, y'know. ~ Alan Goldsher

We need to remain alert to what happens to the body when it is mediatised. Too often, the mediatised body is an anaesthetised body. I would be the last person to argue that the body signifies at some basic level that precedes or transcends its cultural inscriptions. Nevertheless, there is an ethical imperative not to conflate the body with its representations and mediations, but to remember that there is an actual body there somewhere, experiencing the consequences of what is being done to it. ~ Philip Auslander

The Zenjirli inscriptions supply far more suggestive criteria, and show how cautious we must be in coming to conclusions respecting the unity of the Aramaic language. These inscriptions are in many ways more akin to Hebrew and Assyrian than to Aramaic. ~ John Courtenay James

And now I am sitting in the graveyard, staring at two headstones, and feeling good and bad at the same time. The way we do when our own lives continue to unfold, but the lives that gave us life and others that gave our lives meaning have ended. ~ Julene Bair

Headstone: death's bookmark. ~ Les Coleman

Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes. ~ Victor Hugo

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist. ~ Paul Valery

Marble statues, engraved with public inscriptions, by which the life and soul return after death to noble leaders. ~ Horace

The balding headstones
of the others - quarantined

from their own mothers & sisters & daughters -
I wondered if they, like us, were strange

alloys of sadness & forgetting
the words to the songs. ~ Jennifer Givhan

The massive bronze gates were wide open now, too late. Inside, the cemetery had been turned into a grotesque place gleaming with high-powered searchlights, blue flashlight flares, winking pocket torches. Uniformed men were already swarming about. Red cigarette-embers showed oddly amidst the headstones here and there.
("The Street Of Jungle Death") ~ Cornell Woolrich

What a lot of graves there are laid out as far as the eye can see!. Their headstones are like hands raised in surrender, though they are beyond being threatened by anything. A city of silence and truth, where success and failure, murderer and victim come together, where thieves and policeman lie side by side in peace for the first and last time. ~ Naguib Mahfouz

Old willows trailed veils of wet leaves across his path. Moss crawled up the headstones. The place was otherwise deserted. ~ Martha Grimes

Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us: and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. ~ John Locke