Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense. You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain. You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes, and suffocated inside stifling walls. Alone you let the terrible stranger in, and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word about your troubled and exalted life. Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast. Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I, I, sick with grief for the buried past, I, smoldering on a slow fire, having lost everything and forgotten all, would be fated to commemorate a man so full of strength and will and bright inventions, who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me, hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.
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We see but dimly through the mists and vapors Amid these earthly damps What seem to us but sad, funeral tapers May be heaven's distant lamps.
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And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.
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My friends and my road-fellows, pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion. Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own winepress. Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful. Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block. Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking. Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again. Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
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Funeral Blues
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I don't want this to feel like a funeral.
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A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.
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What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral.
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Hired mourners at a funeral say and do - A little more than they whose grief is true
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I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends went to the funeral in one car.
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i am everyone what if i were everyone in the world. every murder would also be a suicide. i'd be the person that shot myself, and the person that sued me for shooting me. id be the jury that sentenced myself to death. id be the judge that delivered the sentence. i'd be the preacher that gave me my last words and the chef that cooked me my last meal. i'd be the guard that escorted me to the little room. i would be the one to inject myself with lethal poisons. i would watch myself die, never feeling my own pain. i would be the preacher that preached at my funeral and the guests that attended it. i would be the pallbearers that carried my own coffin. i would be the person that dug my own grave and the one that set my coffin into the ground. and i would be the little girl that set flowers on the grave. setting flowers on my own grave
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More knowledge may be gained of a man's real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.
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I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.
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A funeral is a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker.
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These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
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It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
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I want to offer congratulations to Pope Benedict XVI, a man of great wisdom, and knowledge. He's a man who serves the Lord. And we remember well a sermon at the pope's funeral in Rome -- how his words touched our hearts and the hearts of millions. We join our fellow citizens and millions around the world who pray for continued strength and wisdom as His Holiness leads the Catholic Church.
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The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.
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A funeral eulogy is a belated plea for the defense delivered after the evidence is all in.
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You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world.
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Man's last day must ever be awaited and none to be counted happy until his death, until his last funeral rites are paid.
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I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it
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I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it.
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How come we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
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Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
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An obituary should be an exercise in contemporary history, not a funeral oration.
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I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.
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A wedding is a funeral where you smell your own flowers.
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I did not attend his funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved it.
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The only reason so many people attended his funeral was they wanted to make sure he was dead.
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