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Funerals are the rituals we create to help us face the reality of death, to give us a way of expressing our response to that reality with other persons, and to protect us from the full impact of the meaning of death for ourselves. Some funerals fulfill these functions beautifully. Others fail.
ALLA BOZARTH CAMPBELL, Life Is Goodbye, Life is Hello
Nowadays, the only occassions that seem to bring families together are weddings and funerals.
JULIA MCNAMARA, The Irish Face in America
Never joke at funerals, or during business transactions.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Israel Potter
People feel guilty enough at funerals without having more guilt heaped on. I would prefer a bighearted preacher giving my eulogy, someone inclined to widen heaven's doors. I don't want to leave folks wondering whether I made it.
PHILIP GULLEY, For Everything a Season
Funerals are pretty compared to death. Funerals are quiet, but deaths not always.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire
After Auschwitz, I no longer cry at funerals.
CHARLOTTE DELBO, Auschwitz and After
The dead do not know the value of white sheets.
Funerals aren't supposed to be funny.
CHERYL ANNE PORTER, Mad About Maddie
Most souls attend their funerals and have some feelings about them, but it's such an individual event. Some souls don't care what happens to their physical bodies. They see the funeral as a ritual for the living so they don't always attend.
ECHO L. BODINE, Echoes of the Soul
Weddings and funerals. That's what religion is good for.
KATE COHEN, A Walk Down the Aisle
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.
E.M. FORSTER, Howard's End
In my recent experiences with death and funerals, I have come to appreciate the need for rituals, for the ceremony, where once I simply felt impatience, even disgust, at the whole procedure. It is hard, though, hard to make a meaningful ceremony out of death in America in our time. Certainly the funeral industry isn't interested in authenticity, it's interested in efficiency, profit, and assembly-line repetition.
ADOLF HESCHL, Das Intelligente Genom
What could be more universal than death? Yet what an incredible variety of responses it evokes ... Funerals are the occasion for avoiding people or holding parties, for fighting or having sexual orgies, for weeping or laughing, in a thousand different combinations. The diversity of cultural reaction is a measure of the universal impact of death.
PETER METCALF, Celebrations of Death
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