Masket Or Casket Quotes

I couldn't get myself to bend down or pick up any dirt to throw it on her casket. I couldn't help to cover her up unless it was with a blanket and only her face were still showing. ~ Michael Kimball

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

What else are there but rituals
To cover up the emptiness
O Disbelief

Lord Nothingness
When my son's suffering ended
My own began

Why did the sun rise this morning
It's not natural
I don't want to see the light

It's not time to close the casket
Or say Kaddish for my son
I've already buried two fathers

With a mother to come
Isn't that enough Lord who wants us
To exalt and sanctify Him

I don't want to wear the mourner's ribbon
Or wake up crying every morning
For God knows how long

I don't want to tuck my son into the ground
As if we were putting him to bed
For the last time ~ Edward Hirsch

We won't get our rituals back if we don't show up. Show up first, and the ritual will come. Insist on going to the cremation, insist on going to the burial. Insist on being involved, even if it is just brushing your mother's hair as she lies in her casket. Insist on applying her favorite shade of lipstick, the one she wouldn't dream of going to the grave without. Insist on cutting a small lock of her hair to place in a locket or in a ring. Don't be afraid. These are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss. ~ Caitlin Doughty

It seemed to him that love was like a great fire, and that people went flying here and there among the flame and smoke seeking wildly for some rich jewel; and when they found it the flame died down; and, in the end, time polished the jewel into a calm beautiful thing. And the two who had found it sometimes forgot about this jewel of love, and that they ever possessed it, or shared it with each other. But sometimes, toward the end of their lives, they remembered about love once more, and opened the casket of memory in which it lay, faded but still beautiful, and looked at it again before they went their ways. ~ Lynn Doyle

If you don't have your game-face on, you're going to go home either to a hospital or to a casket. ~ Joe Teti

The Secret Service agents had been trained to think of every possible scenario...but nowhere in any training or manual was it ever mentioned that the width of the door on Air Force One was just a few inches too narrow for a casket. ~ Gerald Blaine

We were looking for opportunities to share the message with people who wouldn't be caught in a church - unless they were wheeled in via a casket! Matthew 11: 19 says this of Jesus: "The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and "sinners."'  " Jesus didn't get that kind of reputation from hanging out only in temples and church buildings. Going to a bar or pool hall doesn't mean you're a drunk, just like sitting in a henhouse doesn't make you a chicken. It's the same in the opposite setting. Sitting in a church building doesn't make you a follower of Christ. In fact, Acts 17: 24 says: "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands." God lives in heaven and in the hearts of men and women on earth. Misunderstanding this principle is one of the reasons so many people act one way in a church building and the total opposite everywhere else. ~ Jase Robertson

The next home-going service at your church could be yours. And the most important thing on that day won't be the amount of flowers that surround your casket or how well the choir sings your favorite hymn. The only thing that will matter is how well you use that dash between the day you were born and the day you die. ~ Steve Harvey

There are those, too, who are ethnically predisposed in favor of funerals, who recognize among the black drapes and dirges an emotionally potent and spiritually stimulating intersection of the living and the dead. In death and its rituals, they see the leveled playing field so elusive in life. Whether we bury our dead in Wilbert Vaults, leave them in trees to be eaten by birds, burn them or beam them into space; whether choir or cantor, piper or jazz band, casket or coffin or winding sheet, ours is the species that keeps track of our dead and knows that we are always outnumbered by them. ~ Thomas Lynch

In 2008, an Australian company commissioned a study to find out exactly how much people fear public speaking. The survey of more than one thousand people found that 23 percent feared public speaking more than death itself! As Jerry Seinfeld once said, most people attending a funeral would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy!
I can relate to those people because I feared speaking in front of a class or group of people more than anything else when I was a kid. In fact, I dropped speech in high school because when I signed up for it I thought it was a grammar class for an English credit. When I found out it actually required giving an oral presentation, I didn't want any part of it! After hearing the overview of the class on the first day, I got out of my seat and walked toward the door; the teacher asked me where I was going. We had a brief meeting in the hall, in which she informed me that nobody ever dropped her class. After a meeting with the principal, I dropped the class, but on the condition that I might be called upon in the near future to use my hunting and fishing skills. I thought the principal was joking--until I was called upon later that year during duck season to pick ducks during recess! I looked at it as a fair trade. ~ Jase Robertson

I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory. ~ Aldo Leopold

The following spring was a time of calving. Great icebergs calved from the vast glaciers which stretched down to our fjords from distant mountains. The heifers and cows of Kaupangen gave birth to over one hundred calves that spring. Most survived. Gudrod, the master shepherd, had seventy-five new lambkins skipping after their mothers. Ten sets of lamb twins were born in the city that year. Bitches had pups suckling at their breasts. The mountain goats that stood watch over the fjord, indifferently chewing on the wild grasses between the rocks, had kids following them on their steep paths. The residents of the city, too, gave birth. Twenty-one new healthy babies were born within thirty days of the spring equinox; boys and girls with thick blonde, brown, black, or red hair; others with smooth bald heads. Olaf, my third father, my king, had a son, stillborn. Olaf wept. Kenna wept. I wept as the boy was buried inside the casket with his mother in our graveyard by the church. ~ Jason Born

And, because in some hard core of me, in some stubborn trench of selfish refusal, I could not, even at ten years of age, surrender to anything or anyone, I fought that pain. I analysed its offensive, and found its lines of attack. It festered, like the corruption in a wound turned sour, drawing strength from me. I knew enough to know the remedy. Hot iron for infection, cauterize, burn, make it pure. I cut from myself all the weakness of care. The love for my dead, I put aside, secure in a casket, an object of study, a dry exhibit, no longer bleeding, cut loose, set free. The capacity for new love, I burned out. I watered it with acid until the ground lay barren and nothing there would sprout, no flower take root. ~ Mark Lawrence

Imagine three days of God
gone missing. Now,
imagine my lifetime of it.

Better to build
your own sepulcher
inside an idling Charger -
gorged and crimson.

I'd rather roll up on God's
pearly in a blood-red
Benz or BMW.

Any fancy casket will do. ~ Airea D. Matthews

I thought of calling this piece "In Memoriam," because "in memoriam" has always suggested a place to me - Memoriam, Oklahoma, say, or Memoriam, Tennessee - and because, to my tinker's brain, "in memoriam," sounds like "in memory am." Which I am, now more than ever. Lost, basically, wandering that ancestral home, all polished wood and anecdote, wishing that I could unload it somehow, knowing I never will. Like it or not, I have an investment in Memoriam now. My father's casket between the potted palms is the cornerstone. Welcome home, kid.

It's an odd, slightly ghostly predicament. Lacking brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with my mother's memory having long ago lost any trace of me, I find myself the sole surviving owner of ten thousand names, stories, jokes, associations - that time the raccoon reached up through the knothole in the cabin floor when I was four; those Friday nights when the three of us would watch "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."; that evening, a memorable night in 1966, when my dad, with his professorial air and his Czech accent and his horn-rims, put on my mother's shoulder-length blond wig on a dare and went out to pick up the pizza - that mean nothing, except that they were the soil of our lives. ~ Mark Slouka

If I had the money I could buy a torch and read till dawn. In America a torch is called a flashlight. A biscuit is called a cookie, a bun is a roll. Confectionery is pastry and minced meat is ground. Men wear pants instead of trousers and they'll even say this pant leg is shorter than the other which is silly. When I hear them saying pant leg I feel like breathing faster. The lift is an elevator and if you want a WC or a lavatory you have to say bathroom even if there isn't a sign of a bath there. And no one dies in America, they pass away or they're deceased and when they die the body, which is called the remains, is taken to a funeral home where people just stand around and look at it and no one sings or tells a story or takes a drink and then it's taken away in a casket to be interred. They don't like saying coffin and they don't like saying buried. They never say graveyard. Cemetery sounds nicer. ~ Frank McCourt

It was there, in the parlors of the funeral home---my daily stations with the local lately dead---that the darkness would often give way to light. A fellow citizen outstretched in his casket, surrounded by floral tributes, waiting for the homages and obsequies, would speak to me in the silent code of the dead: "So, you think you're having a bad day?" The gloom would lift inexplicably. Here was one to whom the worst had happened, often in a variety of ways, and yet no word of complaint was heard from out the corpse. Nor did the world end, nor the sky fall, nor his or her people become blighted entirely. Life, it turns out, goes on with or without us. There is at least as much to be thankful for as wary of. ~ Thomas Lynch

Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements, lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. - C. S. Lewis, "To Love Is to Be Vulnerable ~ Joshua DuBois

Once the eyes are closed and the heart is stilled, we come to understand that the worst of the pain has passed. For them. The dead have no more use for pain, for memory or regret. Regret is for the living.
And so when we stand at the bedside, the graveside, the casket, our mourning is less for the beloved departed than it is for ourselves. We mourn the missed opportunity, the word unspoken or spoken in haste, the hole in our lives and the unsettling of our souls, our own disappointments and the loss of innocence. ~ Marie Bostwick

The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. ~ Lorrie Moore

Then there was the church and the villagers on the sidewalks, the red geraniums on the graves in the cemetery, Perez fainting (he crumpled over like a rag doll), the blood-red earth spilling over Maman's casket, the white flesh of the roots mixed in with it, more people, voices, the village, waiting in front of a cafe, the incessant drone of the motor, and my joy when the bus entered the nest of lights that was Algiers and I knew I was going to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours. ~ Albert Camus

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust. ~ Orson F. Whitney

minister stepped up beside the casket as the music ended and led them ~ S.K. Epperson

Always have a book at hand, in the parlor, on the table, for the family; a book of condensed thought and striking anecdote, of sound maxims and truthful apothegms. It will impress on your own mind a thousand valuable suggestions, and teach your children a thousand lessons of truth and duty. Such a book is a casket of jewels for your housebold. ~ Tryon Edwards

Deceased's request as stated in last will and testament: 'I want to be made up to look undead, like the fucking sexiest vampire chick you can imagine, for an open-casket viewing. ~ Jen Violi

You have her smile," people said, and I remember looking into the casket at her face, wondering if that meant I'd taken it from her, and the wave of guilt descended on me. ~ Michelle Hodkin

You might argue that my example is bad because Einstein is dead. But according to physicist Erwin Schrodinger, Einstein is neither dead nor alive until we dig him up and open the casket. If he's alive, he might want his brain back, which I understand is in a Ziplock bag in some guy's freezer. And this is a perfect example of why examples always distract from the main point. ~ Scott Adams

According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

Because she did not look behind, September did not see the smoky-glass casket close itself primly up again. She did not see it bend in half until it cracked, and Death hop up again, quite well, quite awake, and quite small once more. She certainly did not see Death stand on her tiptoes and blow a kiss after her, a kiss that rushed through all the frosted leaves of the autumnal forest, but could not quite catch a child running as fast as she could. As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Anne Hathaway
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow's head
as he held me upon that next best bed. ~ Carol Ann Duffy

So sorry for your loss," Grandma said to Monica. "My condolences."
"Yeah, whatever," Monica said.
Grandma leaned into the casket for a close look.
"What are you gonna do, kiss him?" Monica asked.
"I was trying to see where they cut him up when they took his brain out," Grandma said.
Monica sucked in some fake smoke. "You'd have to unzip his pants for that one. ~ Janet Evanovich

President Grant sent a note to Golden. The note read that there was a member of the stake presidency from Coalville, who had passed away. His wife had requested Golden speak at the funeral.

Golden didn't get the note until he returned from a Church assignment in Southern California. By then the funeral was in an hour, and Coalville was almost two hours away He hopped in his Model T and drove as fast as he could. When he arrived, the funeral was almost over. The bishop saw Golden walk in. "Brother Kimball, come forward. We'd like to hear from you."

He went up and said, "I'm very happy to be here. I'm sorry I'm late. I want to tell you what a wonderful person this man was. I knew him, I've stayed in his home. He was an inspiration to me. He was a good father, he was a good husband. He goes to a great reward."

As he started to hit his stride, he looked out in the audience. About the eighth row back, there sat the man he thought was dead!

So he looked down in the casket. He did not recognize the man lying there. Confused, he turned and said, "Say Bishop, who the hell's dead around here anyway? ~ James Kimball

From the short story (and anthology containing it) DONNY DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE :

Donny acted like he didn't hear me. "You can't send your mom off into eternity looking like that, Artie. She wouldn't like it." He reached into my mother's casket, shoved his fingers into her mouth like it was the most logical thing in the world.

"Donny, you can't --!"

"I'm just making her look right, Artie. It's what she would want." He tugged hard at my mom's lips. I knew they were cold because I had kissed them a few moments earlier, and for a moment I felt convinced my friend had completely lost his mind. But when I looked inside Mom's casket I knew Donny had done something only a best friend would think to do. My mother was smiling again. And she looked just the way I remembered her, the way I would always want to remember her. I got so choked up I couldn't talk for a few minutes.

Finally I managed, "My mother always told me you could make her smile. ~ Kenneth C. Goldman

Did you hear the one about the funeral procession?

Well, this funeral procession was goin' up the hill to the church and the back door of the hearse flew open and out shoots the casket and, blametty blam, down the hill it goes through the intersection with horns blowin' and people dodgin' out of the way, and it runs on down the street and jumps up on the sidewalk and busts in through the pharmacy door and shoots down the aisle to the druggist and the lid pops up and this guy sits up and says: 'Got anything to stop this coffin? ~ Jan Karon

Although I'd had no trouble looking at the casket the day before, on that Saturday I did my best to keep my eyes averted. I stared instead at the stained-glass window behind the altar and imagined shooting the panes out with a slingshot. ~ William Kent Krueger

A ray of light peeked through the casket of his heart and shone a ray on the decayed hope there.
- Holt McKnight ~ Jessica R. Patch

Irruption of the magical in the life of Snow White: Snow White knows a singing bone. The singing bone has told her various stories which have left her troubled and confused: of a bear transformed into a king's son, of an immense treasure at the bottom of a brook, of a crystal casket in which there is a cap that makes the wearer invisible. This must not continue. The behavior of the bone is unacceptable. The bone must be persuaded to confine itself to events and effects susceptible of confirmation by the instrumentarium of the physical sciences. Someone must reason with the bone. ~ Donald Barthelme

she acknowledges Thomas only by bending down and scraping a handful of dirt into her hands, her fingernails filling with the cold moist earth and making them brown at the edges. And then she tosses it onto his coffin, where bits and pieces of torn grass and weeds have mixed with the tender soil and are sliding in a small pile down the sides of the domed casket. ~ Tiffani Burnett-Velez

Well, at first the band were simply called Horsepower, but a lot of people thought that was something to do with heroin. That really pissed me off, so I decided to put something in front of it to distract them. I got '16' from a traditional American folk song, where a man is singing about his dead wife and 16 black horses are pulling her casket up to the cemetery. I liked the image of 16 working horses. ~ David Eugene Edwards