“Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
Writer Cormac McCarthy
Posted by Vale
“I still use a manual typewriter (a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robin’s-egg blue) because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys on a computer keyboard doesn’t quite fit with my sense of what writing sounds like. I need the hard metal clack, and I need those keys to sometimes catch so I can reach in and untangle them, turning my fingertips inky. Without slapping the return or turning the cylinder to release the paper with a sharp whip, without all that minor havoc, I feel I’ve paid no respect to the dead. What good is an obituary if it can be written so peaceably, so undisturbingly, in the dark of night?” –From “The Coffins of Little Hope” by Timothy Schaffert
Thanks to Obituary Forum
“Thank you so much for coming. Unlike the rest of you, I don’t have to get up in the morning.”
Rob Buckman, doctor author, actor, comedian and broadcaster, who died last October after a career which was devoted to improving the way medics counsel the terminally ill. He left instructions for this message to be played at his funeral.
“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.”
Irvin S. Cobb
“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
Mark Twain
“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.”
Mae West
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go..”
Oscar Wilde
“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
Clarence Darrow
Hat tip to James Showers
“I was deeply moved by the appreciation shown by many of my children’s peers for my address at my wife’s funeral; their expression of my bravery for doing so was extremely heart warming. I didn’t feel brave, but what was I to do? What better time to offer a celebration of her life and her love for her children and their circle of friends.”
“At the funeral, people turned up who the family didn’t even know, presumably workmates of my dad’s or people he’d played rugby with. It didn’t matter that they didn’t try to talk to us, but it mattered a lot that they’d cared enough to turn up. I can still see, in my mind’s eye, those blokes no-one knew leaving after the funeral, turning up their coat collars because it was raining.”
“I get up, drink my usual four coffees, have a look at the obituaries in The Times, and if I’m not in them, I’ll get on with the day’s work.”
Patrick Moore at 88
“He’s so unpopular, if he became a funeral director people would stop dying.”
The late Tony Banks of John Major. An old quote, but one well capable of being dusted off.
A 90 year-old woman, told she was dying:
“How could this happen to me? Just bad luck I guess.”
Quoted here.
