Quotes about funerals

In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of popular entertainment.

— George Ade

Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.

— Kehlog Albran

A funeral is a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker.

— Ambrose Bierce

A funeral eulogy is a belated plea for the defense delivered after the evidence is all in.

— Irvin S. Cobb

As grand and griefless as a rich man's funeral.

— Sidney Thompson Dobell

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

— George Eliot

The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set.

— Harold Macmillan

On a day of burial there is no perspective -- for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was -- to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.

— Antoine De Saint-Exupery

I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it. [About a politician who had recently died]

— Mark Twain

Some people never head a procession until they're dead.

— Source Unknown

The only reason I might go to the funeral is to make absolutely sure that he's dead.

— Source Unknown

Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.

— Mark Twain

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good.

— W. H. Auden