Obituaries Quotes

I personally believe breathatarianism to be the highest mode of human living [ ... ] breathing in pure air, absorbing the direct light and energies of the sun, bathing in pure water [ ... ] I look at the obituaries every morning and ain't nobody listed but you eaters. ~ Dick Gregory

I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children - and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast - or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps. ~ Marilyn Johnson

I don't listen to the news. I don't read the newspaper unless it's eccentric information - and the obituaries, of course. ~ Maira Kalman

Although champagne was served, the mood was curiously subdued. After this reunion, they would probably never meet together as a class again - at least not in such numbers. They would spend the next decades reading obituaries of the men who had started out in 1954 as rivals and today were leaving Harvard as brothers. This was the beginning of the end. They had met once more and just had time enough to learn that they liked one another. And to say goodbye. ~ Erich Segal

I turn to the 'Telegraph's' obituaries page with trepidation. ~ Christopher Lee

One day a little old lady came and asked my name, saying she couldn't read my nametag. I told her and reached for the little slip of paper she held, but she put it behind her back. It seemed she wanted to chat before giving it up. Fine with me. We chatted about our matching cardigans (the fact that I dress like a little old lady was not lost on me) and we chatted about how the Portland weather bothered her bones. We talked for a long while about her husband and how much she'd grown to hate him over the years. Then, since I guessed I'd earned her trust, she handed me her slip of paper. It was for a book on exotic poisons. I got her the book and spent the next few weeks scanning the obituaries for every old man that had died. So, yes, folks I may be an accomplice to murder. Don't say there's no excitement at the library. ~ Nick Pageant

He was obsessed with obituaries. She'd never read them before, he couldn't believe it, to him it was like someone who'd never read the funnies...Michael always wanted to know what they died of- accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. 'Was it suicide?' That's what he really wanted to know. ~ Janet Fitch

It's not the loss of life that makes the death bitter
it's the obituaries. ~ Evan Esar

I think all the obituaries for newspapers we're hearing are premature. Many papers are belatedly but successfully adapting to the new news environment. I ~ Arianna Huffington

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order. ~ Erma Bombeck

There's a magical part of it (writing obituaries), too, which is you're trying to breathe life back into someone who has just died. You're trying to conjure them up. ~ Marilyn Johnson

Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know. ~ Jeremy Knowles

Here's what I know: I eat mass quantities of red meat, curse religiously, sing out of tune but with conviction. I cry when it suits me, laugh when it's inopportune, read The New York Times obituaries and wedding announcements, out loud and in that order. ~ Julie Buxbaum

Obituaries are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives. I defy you to find a single obituary that begins, "Jane Doe won the Nobel Prize in large part because she was admitted to a prestigious, highly selective preschool. After that, everything just kind of fell into place." Instead, you will read about dead ends, lucky coincidences, quirky habits, excessive self-confidence (often interspersed with bursts of excessive self-doubt), and a lot of passion for something. ~ Charles Wheelan

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying. ~ Don DeLillo

As in most obituaries, the author said little about the man; they rarely do. But the reticence here was greater than usual. It mentioned that Ravenscliff left a wife, but did not say when they married. It said nothing at all about his life, nor where he lived. There were not even any of the usual phrases to give a slight hint: 'a natural raconteur' (loved the sound of his own voice); 'Noted for his generosity to friends' (profligate); 'a formidable enemy . . .' (a brute); 'a severe but fair employer . . .' (a slave-driver); 'devoted to the turf' (never read a book in his life); 'a life-long bachelor' (vice); 'a collector of flowers' (this meant a great womaniser. Why it came to mean such a thing I do not know.) More browsing ~ Iain Pears

I think the idea of fact-checking, I think the idea that you come up through a system where you know how to cover night cops, and then you go on, and you go on to various beats, including writing obituaries, and you get names right, you know how to spell them, really has some advantages to it. ~ Juan Williams

Chronology of any event worked best in obituaries. It had no place in the world of sentiment, where memories, ideas and assumptions co-existed side by side. ~ Noorilhuda

Good priests never look for awards and, perversely enough in the clerical culture universe, do not receive many. Like the aged nuns who taught selflessly and nearly anonymously all their lives, these servants of the People of God only get into the papers when their obituaries are printed. ~ Eugene Kennedy

The decision to rely heavily on high-altitude air power, target urban infrastructure and repeatedly attack heavily populated towns and villages has reflected a deliberate trade-off of the lives of American pilots and soldiers, not with those of their declared Taliban enemies, but with Afghan civilians ... There will be no official two-minute silence for the Afghan dead, no newspaper obituaries or memorial services attended by the prime minister, as there were for the victims of the twin towers. ~ Seumas Milne

It's like obituaries, when you die they finally give you good reviews. ~ Roger Maris

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. ~ Clarence Darrow

Yeah, I can imagine with the funeral and all, this is the last thing you want to be dealing with right now. Like I said, my condolences." Mayhew took his own deep breath, his far more raspy. "We've got a nutshell, but we're still filling in some blanks. You're not the first person in the county to have this kind of thing happen. We suspect it's a gang of young males who read the obituaries, find out when the funerals are, then Google Earth the house and figure out whether it's worth robbing. ~ Karin Slaughter

Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards. ~ Austin Kleon

I used to read the obituaries to gloat over all the people I've outlived, but now I don't think it matters, we all live for just a moment anyway. ~ Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold

He left for his day at the library. Today is research day. When he got there, he went directly to the microfiche machine and began looking through the newspaper obituaries for married men who died between 1980 and 1983. Their widows would be due for a little romance by now. He stayed there for hours, searching for her. His meticulous search netted seven names that merited further investigation. If some husband died and it made the first five pages of the paper, well, that meant a definite bonus because the dead man was powerful and with power came money. Their widows made excellent prospects for his future plans. ~ Jean Holloway

When I wake up in the morning, I immediately check the morning paper. If my name is not in the obituaries, I get up ~ Benjamin Franklin

People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning. ~ Ellen Goodman

Every morning I read the obituaries. If it ain't there I make myself a cup of tea and carry on like I have the past century or so. ~ Lois Greiman

If you start the day reading the obituaries, you live your day a little differently. ~ David Levithan

Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries. ~ Bill Cosby

The obituaries shot up to the top of my list when I discovered Robert McG. Thomas, the 'Times' obit writer who redesigned its traditional form and added a measure of stylistic elegance. ~ Billy Collins

When I saw the photograph I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me.
I had allowed other people to think he was dead.
I had allowed him to be buried alive. ~ Joan Didion

Too many people are overly respectful, braying, 'You're so brave' and Irv fell smack into that trap. After all what's so courageous about having cancer? Once we have it, what choice do we have? But the worst thing of all - and thank God Irv doesn't do this, at least not yet - is all this nonsensical talk about a patient's courageous struggle with cancer that all too often ends in defeat. How many obituaries do you see stating that so-and-so lost their courageous battle with cancer? I hate that! I absolutely hate it! If someone put that in my obituary, I'd come back and kill him! ~ Irvin D. Yalom

I had always imagined Rosa Parks as a stately woman with a bold temperament, someone who could easily stand up to a busload of glowering passengers. But when she died in 2005 at the age of ninety-two, the flood of obituaries recalled her as soft-spoken, sweet, and small in stature. They said she was "timid and shy" but had "the courage of a lion." They were full of phrases like "radical humility" and "quiet fortitude. ~ Susan Cain

A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men. ~ Georges F. Doriot

Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives. ~ Charles Wheelan

Some people do not even want to look at a person when the person is alive, but when the person dies they write eloquent obituaries and make offerings of flowers. At that point the person has died and cannot really enjoy the fragrance of the flowers anymore. If we really understood and remembered that life was impermanent, we would do everything we could to make the other person happy right here and right now. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries - but it is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses ... in the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.' ~ Billy Collins

We like to think of our character in the same way it is written in our obituaries. ~ Ijeoma Oluo

I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.' ~ Tao Lin

Isn't that technology's job? To lighten our burden? To broaden our horizons? To make it possible to talk to your attorney and listen to a Styx album and check the obituaries in the town where your parents continue to live and videotape a race riot and send a text message and stun someone into submission all at the same time? ~ David Sedaris

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that as a species we're just no good at writing obituaries. We don't know how a man or his achievements will be perceived three generations from now, any more than we know what his great-great-grandchildren will be having for breakfast on a Tuesday in March. Because when Fate hands something down to posterity, it does so behind its back. ~ Amor Towles

My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms ~ T. S. Eliot

I've been pronounced dead and I've read my own obituaries. And they were the best reviews I ever read. ~ Elizabeth Taylor

David [Halberstam] kept on doing what he did because he loved it. One of the obituaries I read quoted him as saying that he did journalism for the same reason the great Julius Irving did basketball: He loved doing it even when he was having a bad day. ~ Jonathan Yardley