Top 74 Obituary Quotes & Sayings

The savage repression of blacks, which can be estimated by reading the obituary columns of the nation's dailies, Fred Hampton, etc., has not failed to register on the black inmates.

We're all killers at heart . . . . I have never taken anybody's life, but I have often read obituary notices with considerable satisfaction.

Sometimes a famous subject may even outlive his own obituary writer.

If the lead line in my obituary is 'She once tweeted that the president is a white supremacist,' I will see my life as a professional disappointment.

Everybody is a potential murderer. I've never killed anyone, but I frequently get satisfaction reading the obituary notices.

All publicity is good, except an obituary notice.

We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.

I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

You should never write your own resume, personal ad, or obituary. In all three cases it is better to show your humility by letting someone else lie for you.

One of the things I can do is to try to put myself in different kinds of movies and that kind of subtly changes my work. By the time my obituary is written, I want there to be a great western and a great comedy.

Just make it (his obituary): born in Russia, first lesson at 3, debut at 7, debut in America in 1917.

What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died.

I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America' dies.' Unless I'm completely forgotten, and then it won't say anything at all.

In journalism, we recognize a kind of hierarchy of fame among the famous. We measure it in two ways: by the length of an obituary and by how far in advance it is prepared. Presidents, former presidents, and certain heads of state are at the top of the chain.

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

I contemplated suicide. My main concern was that I would not make the New York Times obituary page.

I always wondered what hearing one's own obituary might sound like, and I sort of feel like I may have just heard part of it at least.

I don't wonder about anything. I'm too old to wonder. I think the most important thing is to wake-up with a pulse. I look in the obituary columns. If I'm not in it, I get out of bed.

women are quoted as sources and appear on interview shows much less frequently than men. ... But the by-product of such anonymity may be immortality, for women are also less likely to find themselves written up on the obituary page.

I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.

In the morning, I get the paper. I look in the obituary column. If I don't see myself in there, I get up.

Never was it [Capitalism] imposed on life as a system, or at all. It grew out of life, not all at once but gradually, and is therefore one of the great natural designs. When it was found and identified by such men as Adam Smith, who wrote its bible, and Karl Marx, who wrote its obituary too soon, it was already working.

I have to erase my Google search histories, because they always lead to an obituary.

So what if someone wrote your obituary... that doesn't mean you are obligated to die.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

There's no bad publicity except an obituary.

My school was so tough the school newspaper had an obituary section.

One phrase you don't want kicking off your obituary is, Never, in the long history of bungee jumping.

I get up every morning and read the obituary column. If my name's not there, I eat breakfast.

The seed for my novel 'Half Brother' was planted in my mind over twenty years ago, but didn't germinate until late 2007 when I came across the obituary for Washoe, an extraordinary chimpanzee who had learned over 250 words of American Sign Language.

Actually, I just want to entertain people. Put that in my obituary, a final picture, all dark in the background.

You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.

Al-Qaeda's obituary has been written countless times over the decade. Each iteration has proved to be ephemeral, as the moment has continually shown itself to have a deeper bench than we imagine.

Live so that when the final summons comes you will leave something more behind you than an epitaph on a tombstone or an obituary in a newspaper.

Hang onto your sense of humor. I picture my obituary : The sexiest man alive is now dead.

Do not give alms promiscuously. Select the unworthy poor and make them happy. To give to the deserving is a duty, but to help the improvident, drinking class is clear generosity, so that the donor has a right to be warmed by a selfish pride and count on a most flattering obituary.

Anyone who has to write an obituary for me one day will probably say, 'She did absolute depths of agony really well.' I'm not, however, an unhappy person.

When the 'Guardian' is commissioning writers to write obituary pieces about you and your career... it doesn't get much nastier than that. And you've just got to go, 'It doesn't actually matter.'

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?

All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike someone they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

If I were to win the Nobel Prize in Literature - which I think it's fairly safe to say is not going to happen - I would still expect the headline on my obituary to read: 'Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr., is dead at 78.'

In my book, 'The Big Three in Economics,' I found that the press has frequently and prematurely written the obituary of Adam Smith and his free-market philosophy, only to see a new and more vibrant global marketplace reemerge after being savagely attacked by Keynesians, Marxists, and assorted socialists.

When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grasshopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast.

When a writer dies you get a higher standard of obituary.

I don't think most people know what's going to be in their obituary, but I do.

There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.

Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

Some people want to amass a great amount of wealth and make a great looking obituary. I'm going to die with more money than is good to leave my son.

The death of Churchill at 90 was one of those watershed moments in which the obituary rises to a special calling beyond the sharing of remembered times. It gave an older generation a rare opportunity to explain something of itself to its children.

When I die, if the word 'thong' appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I've screwed up.

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.

A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.

Men in the uniform of Wall Street retirement: black Chesterfield coat, rimless glasses and the Times folded to the obituary page.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

Everyone wrote our obituary but us and the coaches and the kids who stayed with us. The obit was, 'Vanderbilt will have to leave the Southeastern Conference. All the coaches are leaving, and all the students are transferring.'

If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.

Beyond being timely, an obituary has a more subjective duty: to assess its subject's impact.

A common defense among obituary-fanciers such as myself is that the obit is not about death at all. It is about life. This is true since an article about the condition of deadness would make for turgid reading at best.

Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint's obituary.

This won't look so good in my obituary," Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly-spoken words."Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria.