Wollrab Obituary Quotes

When I die, if the word 'thong' appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I've screwed up. ~ Albert Brooks

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren't, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose? ~ Padgett Powell

He recalls that the room went 'icy cold' as his patient Catherine strangely began to channel messages from Dr Weiss's own deceased family members; things she could not have possibly known. "She didn't know anything about me," Dr Weiss says. "I didn't even have diplomas in my office. This was before the internet, and she's telling me "You're Father's here and your son." Dr Weiss remembers his shock that a stranger shared so many facts about his life, including that his Father had tragically died from a heart condition. "She tells me my daughter is named after my Father..which she is, and it is an unusual name. She said, "Your Father is here; he died from his heart." And she went into other medical details. "I'm thinking, "What is this? How does she know this?" My Father never had an obituary. ~ Tessy Rawlins

Every menu is an obituary. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter. ~ Freeman Dyson

Women are quoted as sources and appear on interview shows much less frequently than men ... But the by-product of such anonymity may be immortality, for women are also less likely to find themselves written up on the obituary page. ~ Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Men in the uniform of Wall Street retirement: black Chesterfield coat, rimless glasses and the Times folded to the obituary page.. ~ Jimmy Breslin

About one month before he was killed, when asked by David Frost how his obituary should read: Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off. I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering. ~ Robert Kennedy

The least dignified thing that can happen to a man is to be murdered. If he dies in his sleep he gets a respectful obituary and perhaps a smiling portrait; it is how we all want to be remembered. But murder is the great exposer: here is the victim in his torn underwear, face down on the floor, unpaid bills on his dresser, a meager shopping list, some loose change, and worst of all the fact that he is alone. Investigation reveals what he did that day - it all matters - his habits are examined, his behavior scrutinized, his trunks rifled, and a balance sheet is drawn up at the hospital giving the contents of his stomach. Dying, the last private act we perform, is made public: the murder victim has no secrets. ~ Paul Theroux

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing. ~ Quentin Crisp

Never was it [Capitalism] imposed on life as a system, or at all. It grew out of life, not all at once but gradually, and is therefore one of the great natural designs. When it was found and identified by such men as Adam Smith, who wrote its bible, and Karl Marx, who wrote its obituary too soon, it was already working. ~ Garet Garrett

The obituary writers drew their incomplete sketches, touring through his life like travelers to England who do not ever see swans, sheep, bicycles, and blue eyes. ~ Mark Helprin

I want to leave behind something worth more than obituary posters when I am gone. ~ Vincent Okay Nwachukwu

I have to erase my Google search histories, because they always lead to an obituary. ~ Carrie Brownstein

The dreams fresh on her mind, she wrote about the Ada she remembered. The obituary wasn't the sad, plodding list of mother and father, dead children, and surviving family. It honored a strong, funny woman. She proofed it a second time with a smile on her face. Ada would have slapped her knee and crowed along with her. ~ Laura Trentham

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

...when you're young you think you'll always be young. Then one day you suddenly wake up and you're over fifty. And the names in the obituary columns are no longer anonymous old people. They're your contemporaries and friends. ~ Jacqueline Susann

EVEN THOUGH I KNEW it was going to be what she would ask me, Graciela McCaleb's request gave me pause. Terry McCaleb had died on his boat a month earlier. I had read about it in the Las Vegas Sun. It had made the papers because of the movie. FBI agent gets heart transplant and then tracks down his donor's killer. It was a story that had Hollywood written all over it and Clint Eastwood played the part, even though he had a couple decades on Terry. The film was a modest success at best, but it still gave Terry the kind of notoriety that guaranteed an obituary notice in papers across the country. I had just gotten back to my apartment near the strip one morning and picked up the Sun. Terry's death was a short story in the back of the A section. ~ Michael Connelly

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium. ~ Philip Guedalla

There's no bad publicity except an obituary. ~ Brendan Behan

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up. ~ Benjamin Franklin

This may read like a mad journey through some of the most dangerous places on earth, but it is much more than that as well. Sheets witnessed most of the wars, disasters, and revolutions that followed the end of communism, and his accounts of them
from Chechnya to Chernobyl, and from Abkhazia to Afghanistan
serve as a passionate but considered obituary for the vanished Soviet empire. ~ Oliver Bullough

There was a Dana Phelps with a son named Brandon, but they didn't live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Phelpses resided in a rather tony section of Greenwich, Connecticut. Brandon's father had been a big-time hedge fund manager. Beaucoup bucks. He died when he was forty-one. The obituary gave no cause of death. Kat looked for a charity - people often requested donations made to a heart disease or cancer or whatever cause - but there was nothing listed. ~ Harlan Coben

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

It would be too much for me to deal with to be sitting up there next to God, Bon Scott, Sid Vicious, and Jimi Hendrix, and hear somebody read my obituary from below:
NIKKI SIXX DIED TODAY ... FUCKING GOLFING ~ Nikki Sixx

A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward. ~ George Jean Nathan

Eight Bells: Robert J. Kane '55D died June 3, 2017, in Palm Harbor, Florida. He came to MMA by way of Boston College. Bob or "Killer," as he was affectionately known, was an independent and eccentric soul, enjoying the freedom of life. After a career at sea as an Officer in the U.S. Navy and in the Merchant Marine he retired to an adventurous single life living with his two dogs in a mobile home, which had originally been a "Yellow School Bus." He loved watching the races at Daytona, Florida, telling stories about his interesting deeds about flying groceries to exotic Caribbean Islands, and misdeeds with mysterious ladies he had known. For years he spent his summers touring Canada and his winters appreciating the more temperate weather at Fort De Soto in St. Petersburg, Florida…. Enjoying life in the shadow of the Sunshine Bridge, Bob had an artistic flare, a positive attitude and a quick sense of humor. Not having a family, few people were aware that he became crippled by a hip replacement operation gone bad at the Bay Pines VA Hospital. His condition became so bad that he could hardly get around, but he remained in good spirits until he suffered a totally debilitating stroke. For the past 6 years Bob spent his time at various Florida Assisted Living Facilities, Nursing Homes and Palliative Care Hospitals. His end came when he finally wound up as a terminal patient at the Hospice Facility in Palm Harbor, Florida. Bob was 86 years old when he passed. He will be missed…. ~ Hank Bracker

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.
(Last words, according to Dickens's obituary in The Times.) ~ Charles Dickens

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

There is a story about Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. One day his older brother died, and a newspaper got the story wrong and printed Alfred's obituary instead. Alfred opened the paper that morning and had the unusual experience of reading his obituary while he was still alive. "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday," the obituary began. Alfred threw down the paper. That's not how I want to be remembered, he said. That's not what's important to me, he said, and right then and there he decided to throw his entire fortune into rewarding people for bettering this world and bringing it closer to peace. ~ Alan A. Lew

Very few, even among those who have taken the keenest interest in the progress of the revolution in natural knowledge set afoot by the publication of the 'Origin of Species'; and who have watched, not without astonishment, the rapid and complete change which has been effected both inside and outside the boundaries of the scientific world in the attitude of men's minds towards the doctrines which are expounded in that great work, can have been prepared for the extraordinary manifestation of affectionate regard for the man, and of profound reverence for the philosopher, which followed the announcement, on Thursday last, of the death of Mr Darwin. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary. ~ Brendan Behan

You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice. ~ Barbara Kruger

[José] Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world [..] He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile - he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive. ~ Harold Bloom

I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure. ~ Clarence Darrow

When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grasshopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast. ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner

What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died. ~ William Faulkner

God will come barefoot
looking for his lost shoe
eaten up by pseudo sons
waiting with charts of Obituary
at every unreal heart-scope
while volcanoes gather around me
( Selected Poems of Malay Roychoudhury ) ~ Malay Roychoudhury

Yet for quixotic reasons
namely, that I enjoyed writing obits
I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move. ~ Avi Steinberg

I get up every morning and read the obituary column. If my name's not there, I eat breakfast. ~ George Burns

When my obituary notice at last appears in The Times, and they say: 'What, I thought he died years ago,' my ghost will gently chuckle. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Until today, you may not have realized that your life provides the content of your obituary. Just for today, examine your life. Think about all of the things you want to leave behind. Remember, the good thing about doing this today is that you still have time to rewrite your life's content if necessary. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't ~ P.G. Wodehouse

All publicity is good, except an obituary notice. ~ Brendan Behan

If I were to win the Nobel Prize in Literature - which I think it's fairly safe to say is not going to happen - I would still expect the headline on my obituary to read: 'Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr., is dead at 78.' ~ Christopher Buckley