95d8956
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I want words at my funeral. But I guess that means you need life in your life.
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life
funeral
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Markus Zusak |
325c974
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How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?
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mourning
loss
death
heart
love
casket
funeral
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Jodi Picoult |
cc54f4e
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I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading - treading - till it seemed That Sense was breaking through - And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum - Kept beating - beating - till I thought My Mind was going numb - And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space - began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, here - And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down - And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing - then -
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pain
depression
elegy
emily-dickinson
funeral
|
Emily Dickinson |
ca1e734
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Be aware of this truth that the people on this earth could be joyous, if only they would live rationally and if they would contribute mutually to each others' welfare. This world is not a vale of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure of life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false.
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science
freethinker
clemens-vonnegut
skeptic
funeral
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Kurt Vonnegut |
7ea604f
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I'm telling you, Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interrupt you at his own funeral.
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funny
funeral
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John Green |
a5143f8
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The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing.
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science
dissection
funeral
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Mary Roach |
e5efe4f
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Being fired has some of the advantages of dying without its supreme disadvantages. People say extra-nice things about you, and you get to hear them.
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furlough
layoffs
funeral
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Howard Zinn |
01b063d
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"Here's the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. [...] I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be mad by the survivors, not the dead. "It's non of their business what happens to them whey the die," he said to me. While I wouldn't go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn't have to do something they're uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to. Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased's ashes into inner space, that's fine. But if it is burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn't have to."
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funeral
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Mary Roach |
f26f501
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It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.
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funeral
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Ann-Marie MacDonald |
79e4f3e
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Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.
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sadness
existential
melancholy
funeral
sartre
existentialism
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Jean-Paul Sartre |
81308e6
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O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes; Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth; Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs. She hath no questions, she hath no replies.
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|
suicide
earth
poem
poetry
christianity
death
the-virgin-suicides
rebirth
funeral
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
544989d
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There's a convention that one doesn't speak ill of the dead. That's stupid, I think. The truth's always the truth. On the whole it's better to keep your mouth shut about living people. You might conceivably injure them. The dead are past that. But the harm they've done lives after them sometimes.
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truth
funeral
harm
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Agatha Christie |
78132cc
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What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now. When people die they are sometimes put into coffins which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots. But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burnt and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antartic, or coming down as rain in rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.
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|
nature
death
science
life
bodies
cremation
rot
burial
molecules
decomposition
decay
energy
funeral
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Mark Haddon |
c545b15
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A funeral is no place for secrets.
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loss
funeral
grieving
secrets
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Mitch Albom |
6984399
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"Pa said, "Won't you say a few words? Ain't none of our folks ever been buried without a few words." Connie led Rose of Sharon to the graveside, she reluctant. "You got to," Connie said. "It ain't decent not to. It'll jus' be a little. The firelight fell on the grouped people, showing their faces and their eyes, dwindling on their dark clothes.All the hats were off now. The light danced, jerking over the people. Casy said, It'll be a short one." He bowed his head, and the others followed his lead. Casy said solemnly, "This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter. Heard a fella tell a poem one time, an' he says 'All that lives is holy.' Got to thinkin', an' purty soon it means more than the words says. An' I woundn' pray for a ol' fella that's dead. He's awright. He got a job to do, but it's all laid out for'im an' there's on'y one way to do it. But us, we got a job to do, an' they's a thousan' ways, an' we don' know which one to take. An' if I was to pray, it'd be for the folks that don' know which way to turn. Grampa here, he got the easy straight. An' now cover 'im up and let'im get to his work." He raised his head."
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death
life
last-words
funeral
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John Steinbeck |
49bef17
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"...Do you think there's somewhere else, some other place to go after this one?" Mandy blurted out. "You mean when you die, where will you end up?" Alecto asked her. "...I wouldn't know... back to whatever void there is, I suppose." "I've thought about it... every living thing dies alone, it'll be lonely after death," Mandy sighed sadly. "That freaks me out, does it scare you?" "I don't want to be alone," Alecto replied wearily. "We won't be, though. We'll be dead, so we'll just be darkness, not much else, just memories, nostalgia and darkness." "I don't want to be any of that either though," Mandy exclaimed, bursting into tears and crying, keeping her eyes to the floor, her voice shaky as she spoke to him. "When we die, we'll still be nothing, the world will still be nothing, everything'll just be nothing!" "You're real though, at least that's something," Alecto pointed out, holding his hand out in front of her. Smiling miserably, Mandy took his hand in her own and sat there beside him quietly."
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time
grief
heaven
depression
death
imagination
sadness
truth
frightened
disturbing
grim
spooky
nirvana
funeral
purgatory
void
misery
scary
kill
dead
lost
dying
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
a2bd562
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Before and after the funeral I never ceased to cry and be miserable, but it makes me ashamed when I think back on that sadness of mine, seeing that always in it was an element of self-love - now a desire to show that I prayed more than any one else, now concern about the impression I was producing on others, now an aimless curiosity which caused me to observe Mimi's cap or the faces of those around me. I despised myself for not experiencing sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, and I tried to conceal all other feelings: this made my grief insincere and unnatural. Moreover, I felt a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy and I tried to stimulate my sense of unhappiness, and this interest in myself did more than anything else to stifle real sorrow in me.
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|
unhappiness
grief
youth
sorrow
death
tolstoy
self-love
funeral
childhood
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Leo Tolstoy |
afec1fa
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I was dead, and I hadn't even been able to attend my own funeral.
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funeral
sarcasm
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Meg Cabot |
5711dcb
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Royal summoned mourners. They came from the village, from the neighboring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who best mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they'd done a good job.
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grief
satisfaction
funeral
phonies
house
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Truman Capote |
a0fc83d
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Nobody really wants to be your friend when they discover that you work with dead people.
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death
friendship
mortician
undertaker
morbid
career
funeral
friend
dead
lonely
dying
|
Rebecca McNutt |
29ccd56
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The mourning of a loved one never ends with a funeral. It comes back every so often, like a stage performer eager for a curtain call and expects you to be loud about it. ...I gave it all the lung capacity I had.
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|
mourning
love
funeral
giants
plague
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Kevin Hearne |
06ae49b
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"My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should? "It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed. "You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole. "It is why we are drawn to babies . . ." He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals."
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|
marriage
karma
spirit
death
life
love
connected
cycle
we-are-one
birth
funeral
|
Mitch Albom |
e63c8b5
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His face looked almost as gray as his suit, and the pouches beneath his eyes looked like little bags for holding all the sadness that his head couldn't hold.
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grief
sadness
suit
broken-hearted
funeral
lonely
memorial
|
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor |
31331dd
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Like weddings, funerals are about unity. Funerals are the unity of a person with the sweet hereafter, assuming that one believes in such a thing.
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unity
living
death
mortuary
undertaker
graveyard
wedding
funeral
dying
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Rebecca McNutt |
f7181b5
|
Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.
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sleep
funeral
|
Cormac McCarthy |
c08f47b
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"<>"
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|
memories
death
sadness
life
dela
i-heart-you-you-haunt-me
lisa-schroeder
funeral
goodbye
black
colors
misery
|
Lisa Schroeder |
39275d2
|
And on a cold Sunday afternoon, he was joined in his home by a small group of friends and family for a 'living funeral'. Each of them spoke and paid tribute.. Some cried. Some laughed. One woman read a poem: 'My dear and loving cousin.. Your ageless heart as you ,love through time, layer on layer, tender sequoia..' .. And all the heartfelt things we never get to say to those we love, Morrie said that day.
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|
living-funeral
living
death
life
funeral
tribute
|
Mitch Albom |
86f2213
|
After the funeral, my life changed. I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough. No more playing music at half-empty night clubs. No more writing songs in my apartment, songs that no one would hear.
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time
life
urgency
precious
perspective
funeral
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Mitch Albom |
69cf2e2
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He knew as deeply as he knew anything that sedation was the prelude to anxiety, stimulation the prelude to exhaustion and consolation the prelude to disappointment, and so he lay on the red velvet sofa and did nothing to distract himself from the news of his mother's death.
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grief
patrick-melrose
funeral
|
Edward St. Aubyn |
35a2e9e
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"Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after... you know... after the funeral we haven't had the money for any of your weird little games and I was hoping you'd be more mature now that Jud's gone," her father had disappointedly added. "How much'd that cake cost you?" "It's paid for," Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. "I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy's last year and I... it was my birthday, dad!" "You can't even be normal about this one thing, can you?" her father had complained. Mandy hadn't cried, she'd only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. "...I'm normal."
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money
mourning
grief
loss
depression
death-of-a-sibling
sibling
brother
cake
argument
birthday
funeral
parent
normal
father
memory
nostalgia
|
Rebecca McNutt |
64bf831
|
What a waste.. All those people saying all those wonderful things, and Irv never got to hear any of it.
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death
life
funeral
tribute
|
Mitch Albom |