Visiting Grave Quotes

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Would you visit my grave if I died?” His eyes grew dark. “I’d die before you were ever in a grave, malyshka.” I loved his possessive side. And I loved his dark side, too.
Danielle Lori (The Maddest Obsession (Made, #2))
Not flowers—never flowers in Terrasen. Instead, they carried small stones to graves to mark their visits, to tell the dead that they still remembered. Stones were eternal—flowers were not.
Sarah J. Maas (Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass, #4))
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army. Visiting Kathy's grave was the less dramatic of the two.
John Scalzi (Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1))
She wished she could visit Mariam's grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But she sees now that it doesn't matter. Mariam is never very far.... Mariam is in her own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
I mean it," I said. "You're in danger." "Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.
Jim Butcher (Grave Peril (The Dresden Files, #3))
When the weather's nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie's grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn't too bad when the sun was out, but twice—twice—we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That's what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner—everybody except Allie. I couldn't stand it. I know it's only his body and all that's in the cemetery, and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand it anyway. I just wished he wasn't there.
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
Gavin saw a grave purely as a marker for the place where a corpse was decomposing; a nasty thought, yet people took it into their heads to visit and bring flowers, as though it might yet recover.
J.K. Rowling (The Casual Vacancy)
Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got $260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it--lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding--sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money. And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream. Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that.
Jenny Downham (Before I Die)
Visiting a grave site would not be appreciated at all to when visiting the individual wanting you to while living
Omar Farhad (Need a Ride? (Need a Ride #1))
There’s a grave I need to visit.
Sarah J. Maas (Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass, #4))
Do not go to my grave. Mary knows, I am not there. Look for me in between pages and on people’s lips. Do not go to my old school. Do not go to my old house — I am not in any of those places. Look for me in your hearts and greet me there.
Kamand Kojouri
Holding the space doesn’t mean swaddling the family immobile in their grief. It also means giving them meaningful tasks. Using chopsticks to methodically clutch bone after bone and place them in an urn, building an altar to invite a spirit to visit once a year, even taking a body from the grave to clean and redress it: these activities give the mourner a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose helps the mourner grieve. Grieving helps the mourner begin to heal.
Caitlin Doughty (From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death)
Alright! You sir, you sir, how about a shave? Come and visit your good friend Sweeney. You sir, too sir? Welcome to the grave. I will have vengenance. I will have salvation. Who sir, you sir? No ones in the chair, Come on! Come on! Sweeney's. waiting. I want you bleeders. You sir! Anybody! Gentlemen now don't be shy! Not one man, no, nor ten men. Nor a hundred can assuage me. I will have you! And I will get him back even as he gloats In the meantime I'll practice on less honorable throats. And my Lucy lies in ashes And I'll never see my girl again. But the work waits! I'm alive at last! And I'm full of joy!
Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors’ toil, without mortal consequence?
Susan Abulhawa
I have always known that you will visit my grave. I see myself as a small brown bird, perhaps a sparrow, watching you from a low branch as you pray in front of my name. I will hear you sound out my epitaph: Aqui descansa una mujer que quiso volar. You will recall telling me that you once dreamed in Spanish, and felt the words lift you into flight. The sound of wings will startle you when you say "volar," and you will understand.
Judith Ortiz Cofer (The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women)
Look at that grave.... Think anyone comes to visit that person?" "Probably not," says Frank. "What's the point in having a gravestone then?" asks Audrey.
Albert Borris (Crash Into Me)
I never know what people are thinking. It's like visiting a country where you don't speak the language and you're trying so hard to understand but no matter how many times you ask for juice, they keep bringing you milk.
Tracey Garvis Graves (The Girl He Used to Know)
I visit her grave as often as I can. I leave bouquets of rosemary and rue, and I tell her that I'm sorry, and I promise her that next time I'll do better. Next time someone makes me a hero, I'll save them.
Seanan McGuire (Rosemary and Rue (October Daye, #1))
These are the kinds of things a guy thinks about when he visits his own grave.
Kami Garcia (Beautiful Redemption (Caster Chronicles, #4))
Old Spice           Every Sunday afternoon he dresses in his old army uniform, tells you the name of every man he killed. His knuckles are unmarked graves.   Visit him on a Tuesday and he will describe the body of every woman he could not save. He’ll say she looked like your mother and you will feel a storm in your stomach.   Your grandfather is from another generation– Russian degrees and a school yard Cuban national anthem, communism and religion. Only music makes him cry now.   He married his first love, her with the long curls down to the small of her back. Sometimes he would pull her to him, those curls wrapped around his hand like rope.   He lives alone now. Frail, a living memory reclining in a seat, the room orbiting around him. You visit him but never have anything to say. When he was your age he was a man. You retreat into yourself whenever he says your name.   Your mother’s father, “the almost martyr, can load a gun under water in under four seconds.   Even his wedding night was a battlefield. A Swiss knife, his young bride, his sobs as he held Italian linen between her legs.   His face is a photograph left out in the sun, the henna of his beard, the silver of his eyebrows the wilted handkerchief, the kufi and the cane.   Your grandfather is dying. He begs you Take me home yaqay, I just want to see it one last time; you don’t know how to tell him that it won’t be anything like the way he left it.
Warsan Shire (Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth)
This is the last time I would ever visit the cemetery or my wife's grave, but I didn't want to expend too much effort in trying to remember it. As I said, this is the place where she's never been anything but dead. There's not much value in remembering that.
John Scalzi (Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1))
The next visit I paid to Nancy Brown was in the second week in March: for, though I had many spare minutes during the day, I seldom could look upon an hour as entirely my own; since, when everything was left to the caprices of Miss Matilda and her sister, there could be no order or regularity. Whatever occupation I chose, when not actually busied about them or their concerns, I had, as it were, to keep my loins girded, my shoes on my feet, and my staff in my hand; for not to be immediately forthcoming when called for, was regarded as a grave and inexcusable offence: not only by my pupils and their mother, but by the very servant, who came in breathless haste to call me, exclaiming 'You're to go to the school-room directly, mum- the young ladies is WAITING!!' Climax of horror! actually waiting for their governess!!!
Anne Brontë (Agnes Grey)
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
James Joyce (Ulysses)
Hell's bells, Susan, you don't know what you've done. You've got to get out of here." She snorted. "Like hell." "I mean it," I said. "You're in danger." "Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.
Jim Butcher (Grave Peril (The Dresden Files, #3))
But Gilbert's visits were not what they once were. Anne almost dreaded them. It was very disconcerting to look up in the midst of a sudden silence and find Gilbert's hazel eyes fixed upon her with a quite unmistakable expression in their grave depths; and it was still more disconcerting to find herself blushing hotly and uncomfortably under his gaze, just as if—just as if—well, it was very embarrassing.
L.M. Montgomery (Anne of the Island (Anne of Green Gables, #3))
Would you visit my grave if I died?” His eyes grew dark. “I’d die before you were ever in a grave, malyshka.
Danielle Lori (The Maddest Obsession (Made, #2))
These folks who visit graves daily, they're the ones who look like ghosts. Who are between life and death.
Valérie Perrin (Fresh Water for Flowers)
I’d taken everyone I loved and killed them off in my heart, one by one. I’d long been tending their graves—secretly visiting and mourning during the day, going out and erecting a cross on starry nights, lying inside and awaiting my own death on starless nights. That was my Atlantis, the kingdom I’d built in the name of separation. I’d never before unearthed so much of myself, and so suddenly at that. Inside the world of my tomb, everyone else was dead, I alone survived, and that was the reason for my sorrow. It didn’t take long to spot the largest sarcophagus. It was the one in which Shui Ling had been entombed, and across the front, it read: This woman is madly in love with me. And then reality finally hit me. I had my old schema (which offered a peephole, really) to blame for my decision to leave this woman, to kill her and preserve her body in this sarcophagus, where she’d stay mine forever. I’d evaded the perils of real relationships and robbed her of the ability to change with time. These two prospects had given rise to “my deep-rooted fear of a real separation, which in turn yielded the avoidant mentality that had only hastened it.
Qiu Miaojin (Notes of a Crocodile)
When man of slender visits you / Nothing on earth that one can do / In well he’ll hide, or watery hole / And he will eat your mortal soul / so if thou seest the man so thin / pray you don’t see him again / for he is not from world we know / he cometh from far down below / on his bed of dirt from grave / from his dank and silent cave / he watches you yet has no sight / he taketh you away at night
Jack Goldstein (101 Amazing Slenderman Facts)
The ones who love us best are the ones we'll lay to rest And visit their graves on holidays at best The ones who love us least are the ones we'll die to please If it's any consolation, I don't begin to understand them
Paul Westerberg
No pain, no gain." You can hear the phrase in the world of physical exercise and conditioning. Muscles that feel no pain are probably getting neither stronger, nor more flexible. It presents an analogy for the exercise of the heart. Those who run the risk of genuine love alone must worry about emotional pain. The more friends; the more good-byes - and the more wakes to attend, the more graves to visit, the more deaths to share. Those who truly live life to the fullest will bear the full cup of suffering. Only those who are willing to pay the price in pain and anguish find life full to the brim. Happy people also suffer; they are no more lucky than the rest. They create their own happiness. That's the rule of thumb. Some thumbs, however, don't seem to rule very well. Slogans and catch-words, for all their conventional wisdom, fail to carry the whole weight of truth; they leave too much room for false inferences. "No pain, no gain" may leave one with nothing but pain - an intolerable amount of it. There is simply no guarantee that pain will bring gain, that hardship will yield happiness, that suffering will make one a better person. It may; but it's not inevitable.
Robert Dykstra (She Never Said Good-Bye)
Dear Jack: I have no idea who he was. But he saved me. From you. I watched from the doorway as he smacked, punched, and threw you against the wall. You fought back hard- I'll give you that- but you were no match for him. And when it was over- when you'd finally passed out- the boy made direct eye contact with me. He removed the rag from my mouth and asked me if I was okay. 'Yes. I mean, I think so,' I told him. But it was her that he was really interested in: the girl who was lying unconscious on the floor. Her eyes were swollen, and there looked to be a trail of blood running from her nose. The boy wiped her face with a rag. And then he kissed her, and held her, and ran his hand over her cheek, finally grabbing his cell to dial 911. He was wearing gloves, which I thought was weird. Maybe he was concerned about his fingerprints, from breaking in. But once he hung up, he removed the gloves, took the girl's hand, and placed it on the front of his leg- as if it were some magical hot spot that would make her better somehow. Tears welled up in his eyes as he apologized for not getting there sooner. 'I'm so sorry,' he just kept saying. And suddenly I felt sorry too. Apparently it was the anniversary of something tragic that'd happened. I couldn't really hear him clearly, but I was pretty sure he'd mentioned visiting an old girlfriend's grave. 'You deserve someone better,' he told her. 'Someone who'll be open and honest; who won't be afraid to share everything with you.' He draped his sweatshirt over her, kissed her behind the ear, and then promised to love her forever. A couple minutes later, another boy came in, all out of breath. 'Is she alright?' he asked. The boy who saved me stood up, wiped his tearful eyes, and told the other guy to sit with her until she woke up. And then he went to find scissors for me. He cut me free and brought me out to the sofa. 'My name's Ben,' he said. 'And help is on the way.' When the girl finally did wake up, Ben allowed the other guy to take credit for saving her life. I wanted to ask him why, but I haven't been able to speak. That's what this letter is for. My therapist says that I need to tell my side of things in order to regain my voice. She suggested that addressing my thoughts directly to you might help provide some closure. So far, it hasn't done the trick. Never your Jill, Rachael
Laurie Faria Stolarz (Deadly Little Voices (Touch, #4))
I visited Anna’s grave to give her a piece of my mind for ever believing it was better for me to spend those years without her. Then I bent down and kissed the gravestone, making sure she knew I understood the decision she ultimately made.
Penelope Ward (Park Avenue Player (A Series of Standalone Novels))
Are you lonely?" Jonathan asks. How could I tell him that my loneliness was crushing? How it felt awful to be lonely but not know how to reach out to people and fill the time I always had too much of? It wasn't that I didn't enjoy being alone, because I did, and could spend hours on solitary endeavors like reading or going for long walks without ever wishing for human companionship. I could visit the animals at the shelter or write another play for the children to perform. But sometimes I craved the presence of someone else, especially if I could be myself.
Tracey Garvis Graves (The Girl He Used to Know)
Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, -a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be, - "Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, As his corse to the rampart were hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot, O'er the grave where our hero we buried.
Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience)
Touch her again and I’ll fucking kill you, Gareth. I’ll make it look like an accident and have my hand on Mom’s shoulder while she cries at your funeral. I’ll even become Dad’s golden boy and make him forget you ever existed. A few years from now, no one will visit your grave anymore and I’ll be the only child this time. You’ll be erased so effortlessly that not a memory of you will be left. So think carefully about that bleak ending next time you consider touching what’s fucking mine.
Rina Kent (God of Malice (Legacy of Gods, #1))
So, where are you from?" Agent Carson asked Reyes. "Originally?" I whirled around to face him again, this time pinning him with a warning glare. Carson was an FBI agent, but I was all about stealth. Surely she wouldn't pick up on my silent threat. He studied my mouth, not the least bit worried about my warning glare, then said at last, "Here and there." I relaxed against the seatback. He didn't say hell. Thank God he didn't say hell. It was always hard to explain to friends how, exactly, one's fiance was born and raised in the eternal flames of damnation. How his father was, in fact, public enemy number one. And how he escaped from hell and was born on earth as a human to be with his true love. As romantic as it all sounded, it was difficult to articulate without garnering a visit from men with butterfly nets.
Darynda Jones (Seventh Grave and No Body (Charley Davidson, #7))
A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don’t visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, “This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic.” You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are - really and truly - still in existence somewhere. I wouldn't ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them up on the latest news, to remind them that I love them. There's a part of me - no matter how childish it sounds - that wonders how they are. "Is everything all right?" I want to ask. The last words I found myself saying to my father, at the moment of his death, were "Take care." Sometimes I dream that I'm talking to my parents, and suddenly - still immersed in the dreamwork - I'm seized by the overpowering realization that they didn't really die, that it's all been some kind of horrible mistake. Why, here they are, alive and well, my father making wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising me to wear a muffler because the weather is chilly. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it. So I don't guffaw at the woman who visits her husband's grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the anniversary of his death. It's not hard to understand. And if I have difficulties with the ontological status of who she's talking to, that's all right. That's not what this is about. This is about humans being human.
Carl Sagan
I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.
Jim Butcher (Grave Peril (The Dresden Files, #3))
My companions said to me, if I would visit the grave of my friend, I might somewhat alleviate my worries. I answered "could she be buried elsewhere than in my heart?
William Jones
We visit...a neighboring grave-yard. I am by this time in a condition of mind to become a willing inmate of the place.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
My solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail had many beginnings. There was the first, flip decision to do it, followed by the second, more serious decision to actually do it, and then the long third beginning, composed of weeks of shopping and packing and preparing to do it. There was the quitting my job as a waitress and finalizing my divorce and selling almost everything I owned and saying goodbye to my friends and visiting my mother’s grave one last time.
Cheryl Strayed (Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail)
Not flowers—never flowers in Terrasen. Instead, they carried small stones to graves to mark their visits, to tell the dead that they still remembered. Stones were eternal—flowers were not".
Sarah J. Maas
Pudge/Colonel: "I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to." Takumi
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
All that (sometimes lifelong) ritual of sorrow—visiting graves, keeping anniversaries, leaving the empty bedroom exactly as ‘the departed’ used to keep it, mentioning the dead either not at all or always in a special voice,
C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)
My mother’s family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, “He was named after the prophet Jerry Mire.
Pat Conroy (The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son)
Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, politics and law. "How about fiction - novels, plays poetry?" I asked. "No," he said, "I have never had time for them. There's so much else I have to read." I said, "Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time and don't know how well I understand Russians; but I do know that if I only read Russian history I could not have had the access to Russian thinking I have had from reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, and Ehrenburg. History only recounts, with some inaccuracy, what they did. The fiction tells, or tries to tell, why they did it and what they felt and were like when they did it." My friend nodded gravely. "I hadn't though of that," he said. "Yes, that might be so; I had always thought of fiction as opposed to fact." But in considering the American past, how poor we would be in information without Huckleberry Fin, An American Tragedy, Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying.
John Steinbeck (America and Americans)
Instructions for Dad. I don't want to go into a fridge at an undertaker's. I want you to keep me at home until the funeral. Please can someone sit with me in case I got lonely? I promise not to scare you. I want to be buried in my butterfly dress, my lilac bra and knicker set and my black zip boots (all still in the suitcase that I packed for Sicily). I also want to wear the bracelet Adam gave me. Don't put make-up on me. It looks stupid on dead people. I do NOT want to be cremated. Cremations pollute the atmosphere with dioxins,k hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. They also have those spooky curtains in crematoriums. I want a biodegradable willow coffin and a woodland burial. The people at the Natural Death Centre helped me pick a site not for from where we live, and they'll help you with all the arrangements. I want a native tree planted on or near my grave. I'd like an oak, but I don't mind a sweet chestnut or even a willow. I want a wooden plaque with my name on. I want wild plants and flowers growing on my grave. I want the service to be simple. Tell Zoey to bring Lauren (if she's born by then). Invite Philippa and her husband Andy (if he wants to come), also James from the hospital (though he might be busy). I don't want anyone who doesn't know my saying anything about me. THe Natural Death Centre people will stay with you, but should also stay out of it. I want the people I love to get up and speak about me, and even if you cry it'll be OK. I want you to say honest things. Say I was a monster if you like, say how I made you all run around after me. If you can think of anything good, say that too! Write it down first, because apparently people often forget what they mean to say at funerals. Don't under any circumstances read that poem by Auden. It's been done to death (ha, ha) and it's too sad. Get someone to read Sonnet 12 by Shakespeare. Music- "Blackbird" by the Beatles. "Plainsong" by The Cure. "Live Like You Were Dying" by Tim McGraw. "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" by Sufian Stevens. There may not be time for all of them, but make sure you play the last one. Zoey helped me choose them and she's got them all on her iPod (it's got speakers if you need to borrow it). Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got £260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it-lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding-sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money. And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream. Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that. OK. That's it. I love you. Tessa xxx
Jenny Downham
I’d taken everyone I loved and killed them off in my heart, one by one. I’d long been tending their graves—secretly visiting and mourning during the day, going out and erecting a cross on starry nights, lying inside and awaiting my own death on starless nights.
Qiu Miaojin (Notes of a Crocodile)
How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors’ toil, without mortal consequence? Somehow that raw question had not previously penetrated the consciousness of the refugees who had become confused in the rank eternity of waiting, pining at abstract international resolutions, resistance, and struggle.
Susan Abulhawa (Mornings in Jenin)
Todd:I had him! His throat was there beneath my hand. No, I had him! His throat was there and now he'll never come again. Mrs. Lovett: Easy now, hush love hush I keep telling you, Whats your rush? Todd: When? Why did I wait? You told me to wait - Now he'll never come again. There's a hole in the world like a great black pit And it's filled with people who are filled with shit And the vermin of the world inhabit it. But not for long... They all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why. Because in all of the whole human race Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two There's the one staying put in his proper place And the one with his foot in the other one's face Look at me, Mrs Lovett, look at you. No, we all deserve to die Even you, Mrs Lovett, even I! Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death will be a relief We all deserve to die. And I'll never see Johanna No I'll never hug my girl to me - finished! Alright! You sir, how about a shave? Come and visit your good friend Sweeney. You sir, too sir? Welcome to the grave. I will have vengenance. I will have salvation. Who sir, you sir? No ones in the chair, Come on! Come on! Sweeney's. waiting. I want you bleeders. You sir! Anybody! Gentlemen now don't be shy! Not one man, no, nor ten men. Nor a hundred can assuage me. I will have you! And I will get him back even as he gloats In the meantime I'll practice on less honorable throats. And my Lucy lies in ashes And I'll never see my girl again. But the work waits! I'm alive at last! And I'm full of joy! ps. love the movie the performance that Johnny Depp did was amazing and he sang amazing.
Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
The hearth is desolate. The children, the unconscious children, who once sang and danced in her presence, are gone. She gropes her way, in the darkness of age, for a drink of water. Instead of the voices of her children, she hears by day the moans of the dove, and by night the screams of the hideous owl. All is gloom. The grave is at the door. And now, when weighed down by the pains and aches of old age, when the head inclines to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human existence meet, and helpless infancy and painful old age combine together—at this time, this most needful time, the time for the exercise of that tenderness and affection which children only can exercise towards a declining parent—my poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of twelve children, is left all alone, in yonder little hut, before a few dim embers. She stands—she sits—she staggers—she falls—she groans—she dies—and there are none of her children or grandchildren present, to wipe from her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death, or to place beneath the sod her fallen remains. Will not a righteous God visit for these things?
Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)
When we buried him, we planted flowers on his grave, and every time I visited I saw that those flowers were my father, were made out of him. He was being born again into the earth, in a new form, and it wouldn't be long until all of his atoms were dispersed across the village, then the country, and then the world, carried off inside birds, growing into plants, and into butterflies. What was the garden, then, if not heaven, if not a place made up of everything that had been lost to us, if not an afterlife? After that, the whole world could be heaven to me.
Seán Hewitt (All Down Darkness Wide)
Fired by the oxygen of irrationality, America entered a period of grave intolerance, not just toward immigrants but toward any kind of antiestablishment behavior. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal, among much else, to make critical remarks about government expenditure or even the YMCA.44 So low did standards of civil liberty fall that police routinely arrested not only almost anyone remotely suspected of sedition, but even those who came to visit them in jail.
Bill Bryson (Made in America)
Mr. Graves, I can settle your visit with your assistant if you'd like to take a seat," the receptionist said. Aiden settled for shrugging a shoulder as he turned his body to face me. Nothing about his expression or body language gave me a warning. "She's my wife." Time stopped. "Handle it for me, would you, Muffin?
Mariana Zapata (The Wall of Winnipeg and Me)
She wished she could visit Mariam's grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But Laila sees now that it doesn't matter. Mariam is never very far. She is here, in these walls they've repainted, in the trees they've planted, in the blankets that keep the children warm, in these pillows and books and pencils.
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it. So I don't guffaw at the woman who visits her husband's grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the anniversary of his death. It's not hard to understand. And if I have difficulties with the ontological status of who she's talking to, that's all right. That's not what this is about. This is about humans being human.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
MOUNT PLAASMOORDE If ever you visit South Africa And do Leave the brilliant beaches of Cape Town for a moment Climb Mount Plaasmoorde Witkruis monument And you’ll see the victims of apartheid White crosses marking a thousand white victims Planted in the earth of a million black victims They lie dissolved in the humus of the soils They were too many to have their own marked graves Too many to build black crosses for And just too hard to forget about Because they make the soil under your feet black
Dauglas Dauglas (Roses in the Rainbow)
I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it. Paul is gone, and I miss him acutely nearly every moment, but I somehow feel I’m still taking part in the life we created together. “Bereavement is not the truncation of married love,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too.” Caring for our daughter, nurturing relationships with family, publishing this book, pursuing meaningful work, visiting Paul’s grave, grieving and honoring him, persisting…my love goes on—lives on—in a way I’d never expected.
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
These folks who visit graves daily, they’re the ones who look like ghosts. Who are between life and death.
Valérie Perrin (Fresh Water for Flowers)
Out of my numerous visits I have made to Catfish Plantation, I never photographed an entity like this. It looks like an angel.
Michael Graves (A Catfish Tale)
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.
John Scalzi (Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1))
There’s something special about visiting a graveyard. Both life and death meet together in time.
Eric Overby
Moving on felt like burying my past self all over again and swearing to never visit her grave, even if she just wanted flowers. I couldn't bring myself to abandon her entirely.
Katelyn Saul (How Roses Grow Thorns)
Perhaps you have visited my grave and flowers left, but did you hear me cry out to you!
Nancy B. Brewer
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.
John Scalzi (Old Man's War: Book 1)
And afterwards the People did wander over that Country of Silence, and made visit and honour to their Ancestors, if such were deserving.
William Hope Hodgson (The Night Land)
she went on a solo trip to Italy, role-playing a character in a Forster novel. In Florence, she read performatively in cafés and sat in the cool of exquisite churches, straining for some kind of spiritual feeling. In Rome, she visited the Non-Catholic Cemetery and sought out the graves of Keats and Shelley and found herself moved and mortified by being moved.
David Nicholls (You Are Here)
I visited her more than I had the grave of my own mother. But I don't feel my mother there; she is with me where I am; in my daughter's smile, in the whispers that soothe me when I'm off track.
Patti Smith
My mother brought my father's ashes back with her to South Korea. We're finally together again as a family. I hope someday to honor my father's final request to bring him back to Hysean, where he can be buried next to his father and grandfather on the hill overlooking the Yalu River. If that time comes, I will visit my grandmother's grave as well and tell her that, once again, Chosun is whole.
Yeonmi Park (In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom)
When someone dies, we spend so much time looking for an explanation. The rest of the time we spend making sure we won't forget them. So we build statues. Hold memorials. Visit graves. All of these physical markers that make it impossible to forget. But what if it's the opposite? What if the only way we can really remember is if we stop looking to the past? Maybe then they'll become more them and less us.
Michael Belanger
Have you forgotten me? by Nancy B. Brewer The bricks I laid or the stitches I sewed. I was the one that made the quilt; a drop of blood still shows from my needle prick. Your wedding day in lace and satin, in a dress once worn by me. I loaned your newborn baby my christening gown, a hint of lavender still preserved. Do you know our cause, the battles we won and the battles we lost? When our soldiers marched home did you shout hooray! Or shed a tear for the fallen sons. What of the fields we plowed, the cotton, the tobacco and the okra, too. There was always room at my table for one more, Fried chicken, apple pie, biscuits and sweet ice tea. A time or two you may have heard our stories politely told. Some of us are famous, recorded on the pages of history. Still, most of us left this world without glory or acknowledgment. We were the first to walk the streets you now call home, Perhaps you have visited my grave and flowers left, but did you hear me cry out to you? Listen, my child, to the voices of your ancestors. Take pride in our accomplishments; find your strength in our suffering. For WE are not just voices in the wind, WE are a living part of YOU!
Nancy B. Brewer (Beyond Sandy Ridge)
look at the painting again. Despite the obvious differences, this girl is deeply, achingly familiar. In her I see myself at twelve years old, on a rare afternoon away from my chores. In my twenties, seeking refuge from a broken heart. Only a few days ago, visiting my parents’ graves in the family cemetery, halfway between the dory in the haymow and the wheelchair in the sea. From the recesses of my brain a word floats up: synecdoche. A part that stands in for the whole. Christina’s World. The
Christina Baker Kline (A Piece of the World)
Dan, who was writing a book on the radical activity of the twenties and thirties, took the occasion of our trip to ask me about them. The whole thing seems to me so stale that I can't imagine anybody's now wanting to write about it, but we ran over the personalities and I told him a lot of stories. It seemed to me like that grisly museum of the early 1900's that I had had him visit at Niagara Falls: old stuffed two-headed calves, motheaten panthers attacking a stag, dried-up corpses from Indian graves, big bags made of rubber tires in which people had tried to shoot the falls--and around it all-powerful industrial life that no show of resistance could stop, which had ruined the landscape of the river and was crowding out everything else.
Edmund Wilson (Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York)
It’s good you have a grave to visit.” Ginny stared out the window with a pleasant smile on her face. There was no telling where her mind was. “When your father died, I remember standing at his grave and thinking, This is the place where I can leave my grief.
Karin Slaughter (Pretty Girls)
Ida finally made up her mind when she visited her father’s grave. She asked herself what he would have advised her to do, and she felt sure that he would have told her to reach for the stars, that Jesus promised that people could move mountains if they only believed.
Janet Benge (Ida Scudder: Healing Bodies, Touching Hearts (Christian Heroes: Then & Now))
Don't let the darkness that's been visited upon this family pull you in so deeply, you cannot get out. Turn back from it, darling Jo... he'd warned her. He didn't seem to understand that turning your back on the darkness didn't mean the darkness would turn its back on you.
Jennifer Donnelly (These Shallow Graves)
But life seemed fuller, more populated than it had a year ago. She went to exhibitions and films, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, and when she’d saved enough of Neil’s money, which was her money, she went on a solo trip to Italy, role-playing a character in a Forster novel. In Florence, she read performatively in cafés and sat in the cool of exquisite churches, straining for some kind of spiritual feeling. In Rome, she visited the Non-Catholic Cemetery and sought out the graves of Keats and Shelley and found herself moved and mortified by being moved.
David Nicholls (You Are Here)
When your father died, I remember standing at his grave and thinking, This is the place where I can leave my grief. It wasn't immediately, of course, but I had somewhere to go, and every time I visited the cemetery, I felt like when I got back into my car, a tiny little bit of grief was gone.
Karin Slaughter (Pretty Girls)
Who am I trying to fool? I'm well aware that at every stage of history there have been crimes against humanity, and they couldn't have happened without humans to commit them. The crimes that have been visited on my children have been committed, and still are being committed, by young people just like them, by people stirring up their delusions, giving them delusions of grandeur. So why do I imagine that people might improve? Everything going on around us seems to indicate that the values our forebears passed down to us no longer apply. Instead, we have sown the seeds of mistrust, scepticism and resignation, which will grow into a jungle of nihilism and cynicism, a jungle in which you will never find the courage to even mention the names of goodness, truth and common humanity, a corp that is now bearing fruit with remarkable speed. We're obliged to dig our own children's graves, but what's even more shocking is that these crimes are creating a future in which there is no place for truth and human decency. Nobody dare to speak truth anymore. Oh, my poor children ... we are burying you, but you should realize that we are also digging a grave for our future. Can you hear me?
محمود دولت‌آبادی (The Colonel)
One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one’s regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different. For instance, sometimes when I am walking along the seashore, or visiting the grave of a friend, I will remember a day, a long time ago, when I didn’t bring a flashlight with me to a place where I should have brought a flashlight, and the results were disastrous. Why didn’t I bring a flashlight? I think to myself, even though it is too late to do anything about it. I should have brought a flashlight.
Lemony Snicket (The Reptile Room (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #2))
Demeter lost her gaeity for ever when young Core, afterwards called Persephone, was taken from her. Hades fell in love with Core, and went to ask Zeus’s leave to marry her. Zeus feared to offtend his older brother by a downright refusal, but knew also that Demeter would not forgive him if Core were committed to Tartarus; he therefore answered politically that he could neither give nor withold his consent. This emboldened Hades to abduct the girl, as she was picking flowers in a meadow-it may have been at Sicilian Enno; r at Attic Colonus; or at Hermione; or somewhere in Crete, or near Pisa, or near Lerna; or beside Arcadian Phenus, or at Boetian Nysa, or anywhere else in the widely separated regions which Demeter visited in her wandering search for Core. But her own priests say it was at Eleusis. She sought Core without rest for nine days and nights, neither eating nor drinking, and calling fruitlessly all the while.
Robert Graves (The Greek Myths 1)
A being disappeared who was protected by none, dear to none, interesting to none, and who never even attracted to himself the attention of those students of human nature who omit no opportunity of thrusting a pin through a common fly, and examining it under the microscope. A being who bore meekly the jibes of the department, and went to his grave without having done one unusual deed, but to whom, nevertheless, at the close of his life appeared a bright visitant in the form of a cloak, which momentarily cheered his poor life, and upon whom, thereafter, an intolerable misfortune descended, just as it descends upon the mighty of this world!
Nikolai Gogol
And now without redemption all mankind Must have been lost, adjudged to death and hell By doom severe, had not the Son of God, In whom the fullness dwells of love divine, His dearest mediation thus renewed. 'Father, Thy word is passed, man shall find grace; And shall grace not find means, that finds her way, The speediest of Thy winged messengers, To visit all Thy creatures, and to all Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought, Happy for man, so coming; he her aid Can never seek, once dead in sins and lost; Atonement for himself or offering meet, Indebted and undone, hath none to bring: Behold Me then, Me for him, life for life I offer, on Me let Thine anger fall; Account Me man; I for his sake will leave Thy bosom, and this glory next to Thee Freely put off, and for him lastly die Well pleased, on Me let death wreak all his rage; Under his gloomy power I shall not long Lie vanquished; Thou hast given Me to possess Life in Myself forever, by Thee I live, Though now to death I yield, and am his due All that of Me can die, yet that debt paid, Thou wilt not leave Me in the loathsome grave His prey, nor suffer My unspotted soul Forever with corruption there to dwell; But I shall rise victorious, and subdue My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil; Death his death's wound shall then receive, and stoop Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmed.
John Milton (Paradise Lost and Other Poems)
[During World War I] General Pershing, commander in chief of our expeditionary forces, on arriving in France, officially visited Lafayette's grave, laid a wreath on it, and said, "Lafayette, we are here." By this, he meant that the Americans were eager to repay to France their debt of gratitude for what Lafayette had done for them during the Revolutionary War.
Hélène A. Guerber (The Story of the Americans)
it is Simone I want to visit in her cramped grave. To thank her for a single line in The Second Sex that I read in my midtwenties. It rang in my head like a bell, tolling the direction to my future. I paraphrase: In order to create, one must be deeply rooted in society. After reading that line I vowed to elbow my way in, to be heard. I knew women had been pushed to the margins.
Natalie Goldberg (Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home: A Memoir)
From my childhood I had heard read, and read the Bible myself. Morning and evening the sacred volume was opened and prayers were said. The Bible was my first history, the Jews were the first people, and the events narrated by Moses and the other inspired writers, and those predicted by prophets were the all important things. In other books were found the thoughts and dreams of men, but in the Bible were the sacred truths of God. Yet in spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God. He was so saving of mercy, so extravagant in murder, so anxious to kill, so ready to assassinate, that I hated him with all my heart. At his command, babes were butchered, women violated, and the white hair of trembling age stained with blood. This God visited the people with pestilence -- filled the houses and covered the streets with the dying and the dead -- saw babes starving on the empty breasts of pallid mothers, heard the sobs, saw the tears, the sunken cheeks, the sightless eyes, the new made graves, and remained as pitiless as the pestilence. This God withheld the rain -- caused the famine, saw the fierce eyes of hunger -- the wasted forms, the white lips, saw mothers eating babes, and remained ferocious as famine.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Several days later, the doctor paid us a visit. Dr. Reid was his name, an elderly gentleman, or so he appeared; but with doctors it is hard to tell, as they put on grave faces and carry many sorts of illnesses about them in their leather satchels where they keep the knives, and this makes them old before their time; and as with crows, when you see two or three of them gathered together you know there is a death in the offing, and they are discussing it.
Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace)
Whoever has been poor and lonely himself understands other poor and lonely people all the better. At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death. One day Frau Wilke whispered, as she stretched out her hand and arm to me: "Hold my hand. It's like ice." I took her poor, old, thin hand in mine. It was cold as ice. Frau Wilke crept about her home now like a ghost. Nobody visited her. For days she sat alone in her unheated room. To be alone: icy, iron terror, foretaste of the grave, forerunner of unpitying death. Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another's loneliness strange. I began to realize that Frau Wilke had nothing to eat. The lady who owned the house, and later took Frau Wilke's rooms, allowing me to stay in mine, brought, of course in pity for her forsaken state, every midday and evening a cup of broth, but not for long, and so Frau Wilke faded away. She lay there, no longer moving: and soon she was taken to the city hospital, where, after three days, she died. One afternoon soon after her death, I entered her empty room, into which the good evening sun was shining, gladdening it with rose-bright, gay and soft colors. There I saw on the bed the things which the poor lady had till recently worn.... The strange sight of them made me unspeakably sad, and my peculiar state of mind made it seem to me almost that I had died myself, and life in all its fullness, which had often appeared so huge and beautiful, was thin and poor to the point of breaking. All things past, all things vanishing away, were more close to me than ever. For a long time I looked at Frau Wilke's possessions, which now had lost their mistress and lost all purpose, and at the golden room, gloried by the smile of the evening sun, while I stood there motionless, not understanding anything anymore.
Robert Walser (Berlin Stories)
What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, intently studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit, tracing the course of obscure rivers, checking elevations, consulting the marginal notes to see what a little circle with a flag on it signifies and what's the difference between a pictogram of an airplane with a circle around it and one without, issuing small profound "hmmmms" and nodding my head gravely without having the faintest idea why.
Bill Bryson (Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)
In winter he visited his other villages or spent his time reading. The books he read were chiefly historical, and on these he spent a certain sum every year. He was collecting, as he said, a serious library, and he made it a rule to read through all the books he bought. He would sit in his study with a grave air, reading—a task he first imposed upon himself as a duty, but which afterwards became a habit affording him a special kind of pleasure and a consciousness of being occupied with serious matters.
Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
Do you know what day it is?” she asked, peering at him. “Don’t you?” “Here in Spindle Cove, we ladies have a schedule. Mondays are country walks. Tuesdays, sea bathing. Wednesdays, you’d find us in the garden.” She touched the back of her hand to his forehead. “What is it we do on Mondays?” “We didn’t get to Thursdays.” “Thursdays are irrelevant. I’m testing your ability to recall information. Do you remember Mondays?” He stifled a laugh. God, her touch felt good. If she kept petting and stroking him like this, he might very well go mad. “Tell me your name,” he said. “I promise to recall it.” A bit forward, perhaps. But any chance for formal introductions had already fallen casualty to the powder charge. Speaking of the powder charge, here came the brilliant mastermind of the sheep siege. Damn his eyes. “Are you well, miss?” Colin asked. “I’m well,” she answered. “I’m afraid I can’t say the same for your friend.” “Bram?” Colin prodded him with a boot. “You look all of a piece.” No thanks to you. “He’s completely addled, the poor soul.” The girl patted his cheek. “Was it the war? How long has he been like this?” “Like this?” Colin smirked down at him. “Oh, all his life.” “All his life?” “He’s my cousin. I should know.” A flush pressed to her cheeks, overwhelming her freckles. “If you’re his cousin, you should take better care of him. What are you thinking, allowing him to wander the countryside, waging war on flocks of sheep?” Ah, that was sweet. The lass cared. She would see him settled in a very comfortable asylum, she would. Perhaps Thursdays would be her day to visit and lay cool cloths to his brow. “I know, I know,” Colin replied gravely. “He’s a certifiable fool. Completely unstable. Sometimes the poor bastard even drools. But the hell of it is, he controls my fortune. Every last penny. I can’t tell him what to do.” “That’ll be enough,” Bram said. Time to put a stop to this nonsense. It was one thing to enjoy a moment’s rest and a woman’s touch, and another to surrender all pride. He gained his feet without too much struggle and helped her to a standing position, too. He managed a slight bow. “Lieutenant Colonel Victor Bramwell. I assure you, I’m in possession of perfect health, a sound mind, and one good-for-nothing cousin.” “I don’t understand,” she said. “Those blasts…” “Just powder charges. We embedded them in the road, to scare off the sheep.” “You laid black powder charges. To move a flock of sheep.” Pulling her hand from his grip, she studied the craters in the road. “Sir, I remain unconvinced of your sanity. But there’s no question you are male.” He raised a brow. “That much was never in doubt.” Her only answer was a faint deepening of her blush. “I assure you, all the lunacy is my cousin’s. Lord Payne was merely teasing, having a bit of sport at my expense.” “I see. And you were having a bit of sport at my expense, pretending to be injured.” “Come, now.” He leaned forward her and murmured, “Are you going to pretend you didn’t enjoy it?” Her eyebrows lifted. And lifted, until they formed perfect twin archer’s bows, ready to dispatch poison-tipped darts. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.
Tessa Dare (A Night to Surrender (Spindle Cove, #1))
So far as he could prevent it, Dickens never permitted a day of his life to be ordinary. There was always some prank, some impetuous proposal, some practical joke, some sudden hospitality, some sudden disappearance. It is related of him (I give one anecdote out of a hundred) that in his last visit to America, when he was already reeling as it were under the blow that was to be mortal, he remarked quite casually to his companions that a row of painted cottages looked exactly like the painted shops in a pantomime. No sooner had the suggestion passed his lips than he leapt at the nearest doorway and in exact imitation of the clown in the harlequinade, beat conscientiously with his fist, not on the door (for that would have burst the canvas scenery of course), but on the side of the doorpost. Having done this he lay down ceremoniously across the doorstep for the owner to fall over him if he should come rushing out. He then got up gravely and went on his way. His whole life was full of such unexpected energies, precisely like those of the pantomime clown.
G.K. Chesterton
Demeter was so angry that, instead of returning to Olympus, she contonued to wander about the earth, forbidding the trees to yield fruit and the herbs to grown, until the race of men stood in danger of extinction. Zeus, ashamed to visit Demeter in person at Eleusis, sent her first a message by Iris (of which she took notice), and then a deputation of the Olympian gods, with conciliatory gifts, begging her to be reconciled to his will. But she would not return to Olympus, and swore the earth must remain barren until Core had been restored.
Robert Graves (The Greek Myths 1)
So,” he said. “You think there’s nothing inherently wrong with believing in something—or saying you do—for money?” “‘Inherently wrong,’” she said. “Gosh, that’s a great example of calcified morality. I have to remember that for my old modern ethics teacher, Mr. Bastie; he collects them. Look,” she said, straightening her spine and flicking her rather grave (despite the friendly antics of her face) gray eyes at Alex, “if I believe, I believe. Who are you to judge my reasons?” “Because if your reasons are cash, that’s not belief. It’s bullshit.
Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad)
Words, so much more readily remembered, gradually replace our past with their own. Our birth pangs become pages. Our battles, our triumphs, our trophies, our stubbed toes, will survive only in their descriptions; because it is the gravestone we visit, when we visit, not the grave. It is against the stone we stand our plastic flowers. Who wishes to bid good morrow to a box of rot and bones? We say a name, and only a faint simulacrum of its object forms itself (if any at all does)- forms itself in that grayless gray area of consciousness where we put imaginary maps and once heard music; where we hunt for lost articles and diagram desire.
William H. Gass
The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done, I stand above my father’s grave with rage, often, often before I’ve made this awful pilgrimage to one who cannot visit me, who tore his page out: I come back for more, I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn O ho alas alas When will indifference come, I moan & rave I’d like to scrabble till I got right down away down under the grass and ax the casket open ha to see just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard we’ll tear apart the mouldering grave clothes ha then Henry will heft the ax once more, his final card, and fell it on the start.
John Berryman
When they first came back to Kabul, it distressed Laila that she didn’t know where the Taliban had buried Mariam. She wished she could visit Mariam’s grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But Laila sees now that it doesn’t matter. Mariam is never very far. She is here, in these walls they’ve repainted, in the trees they’ve planted, in the blankets that keep the children warm, in these pillows and books and pencils. She is in the children’s laughter. She is in the verses Aziza recites and in the prayers she mutters when she bows westward. But, mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
...The gulag—with its millions of victims, if you listen to Solzehnitsyn and Sakharov—supposedly existed in the Soviet Union right down to the very last days of communism. If so—as I've asked before—where did it disappear to? That is, when the communist states were overthrown, where were the millions of stricken victims pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of torment? I'm not saying they don't exist; I'm just asking, where are they? One of the last remaining camps, Perm-35—visited in 1989 and again in '90 by Western observers—held only a few dozen prisoners, some of whom were outright spies, as reported in the Washington Post. Others were refuseniks who tried to flee the country. The inmates complained about poor-quality food, the bitter cold, occasional mistreatment by guards. I should point out that these labor camps were that: they were work camps. They weren't death camps that you had under Nazism where there was a systematic extermination of the people in the camps. So there was a relatively high survival rate. The visitors also noted that throughout the 1980s, hundreds of political prisoners had been released from the various camps, but hundreds are not millions. Even with the great fall that took place after Stalin, under Khrushchev, when most of the camps were closed down...there was no sign of millions pouring back into Soviet life—the numbers released were in the thousands. Why—where are the victims? Why no uncovering of mass graves? No Nuremburg-style public trials of communist leaders, documenting the widespread atrocities against these millions—or hundreds of millions, if we want to believe our friend at the Claremont Institute. Surely the new...anti-communist rulers in eastern Europe and Russia would have leaped at the opportunity to put these people on trial. And the best that the West Germans could do was to charge East German leader Erich Honecker and seven of his border guards with shooting persons who tried to escape over the Berlin Wall. It's a serious enough crime, that is, but it's hardly a gulag. In 1955[sic], the former secretary of the Prague communist party was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. 'Ah, a gulag criminal!' No, it was for ordering police to use tear gas and water cannons against demonstrators in 1988. Is this the best example of bloodthirsty communist repression that the capitalist restorationists could find in Czechoslovakia? An action that doesn't even qualify as a crime in most Western nations—water cannons and tear gas! Are they kidding? No one should deny that crimes were committed, but perhaps most of the gulag millions existed less in reality and more in the buckets of anti-communist propaganda that were poured over our heads for decades.
Michael Parenti
Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term. And yes, the transgressive element of dissection had certainly decreased from the bad old days. (Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”) Yet the best-informed people—doctors—almost never donated their bodies. How informed were the donors, then? As one anatomy professor put it to me, “You wouldn’t tell a patient the gory details of a surgery if that would make them not consent.” Even if donors were informed enough—and they might well have been, notwithstanding one anatomy professor’s hedging—it wasn’t so much the thought of being dissected that galled. It was the thought of your mother, your father, your grandparents being hacked to pieces by wisecracking twenty-two-year-old medical students. Every time I read the pre-lab and saw a term like “bone saw,” I wondered if this would be the session in which I finally vomited. Yet I was rarely troubled in lab, even when I found that the “bone saw” in question was nothing more than a common, rusty wood saw. The closest I ever came to vomiting was nowhere near the lab but on a visit to my grandmother’s grave in New York, on the twentieth anniversary of her death. I found myself doubled over, almost crying, and apologizing—not to my cadaver but to my cadaver’s grandchildren. In the midst of our lab, in fact, a son requested his mother’s half-dissected body back. Yes, she had consented, but he couldn’t live with that. I knew I’d do the same. (The remains were returned.) In
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
I asked her to tell me what the best moment of her life had been Did she? Yes, she told me about a trip the two of you had taken to Europe together right after you graduated from high school. Pascal in Paris, it had been a dream of hers to visit Pascal’s grave. On that trip she finally did. I’d never seen her so excited. That wasn’t it. It wasn’t? No, it was in a hostel in Venice. The two of you had been travelling for a couple of weeks and all of your clothes were filthy. You didn’t mind the dirty clothes very much. Lila said you were able to roll with the punches and for you, everything about the trip, even the dirty laundry, was a great adventure. But Lila liked things a certain way, and she hated being dirty. That day she had gone off in search of a laundry mat but hadn’t been able to find one. You were sleeping in a room with a dozen bunks, women and men together. In the middle of the night Lila woke up and realized you weren’t in your bed. She thought you must have gone to the bathroom, but after a couple minutes when you hadn’t returned she became worried. She climbed down from her bunk and went to the bathroom to find you, you weren’t there. She wondered up and down the hallway softly calling your name. A few of the rooms were private and had the doors closed. As she became increasingly worried she began putting her ear to those doors listening for you. Then she heard banging down below. Alarmed she went down the dark stairwell to the basement. She saw you before you saw her. You were working in the dim light of a single blub standing over an old hand operated washing machine. She asked what you were doing, what does it look like you said smiling. What Lila remembered from that night was that you actually looked happy to be standing there in the cold basement in the middle of the night washing clothes by hand. And she knew you wouldn’t have minded wearing dirty clothes for another week or two, you were doing it for her. She said that. Yes when I asked her what the best moment of her life had been she had told me that story. But it was nothing. To her it was.
Michelle Richmond (No One You Know)
Grief, and that together, transformed him into a complete hermit: he threw up his office of magistrate, ceased even to attend church, avoided the village on all occasions, and spent a life of entire seclusion within the limits of his park and grounds; only varied by solitary rambles on the moors, and visits to the grave of his wife, mostly at evening, or early morning before other wanderers were abroad.  But he was too good to be thoroughly unhappy long.  He didn’t pray for Catherine’s soul to haunt him.  Time brought resignation, and a melancholy sweeter than common joy.  He recalled her memory with ardent, tender love, and hopeful aspiring to the better world; where he doubted not she was gone.
Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)
The South Col is a vast, rocky area, maybe the size of four football pitches, strewn with the remnants of old expeditions. It was here in 1996, in the fury of the storm, that men and women had struggled for their lives to find their tents. Few had managed it. Their bodies still lay here, as cold as marble, many now partially buried beneath snow and ice. It was a somber place: a grave that their families could never visit. There was an eeriness to it all--a place of utter isolation; a place unvisited by all but those strong enough to reach it. Helicopters can barely land at base camp, let alone up here. No amount of money can put a man up here. Only a man’s spirit can do that. I liked that. The wind now blew in strong gusts over the lip of the col and ruffled the torn material of the wrecked tents. It felt as if the mountain were daring me to proceed.
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
I took the Washington bus; wasted some time there wandering around; went out of my way to see the Blue Ridge, heard the bird of Shenandoah and visited Stonewall Jackson’s grave; at dusk stood expectorating in the Kanawha River and walked the hillbilly night of Charleston, West Virginia; at midnight Ashland, Kentucky, and a lonely girl under the marquee of a closed-up show. The dark and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinnati at dawn. Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem. By night Missouri, Kansas fields, Kansas night-cows in the secret wides, crackerbox towns with a sea for the end of every street; dawn in Abilene. East Kansas grasses become West Kansas rangelands that climb up to the hill of the Western night.
Jack Kerouac (On the Road)
During some years, I hoped that she did live; and I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical use of the word, myriad, I may say that on my different visits to London, I have looked into many, many myriads of female faces, in the hope of meeting her. I should know her again amongst a thousand, if I saw her for a moment; for, though not handsome, she had a sweet expression of countenance, and a peculiar and graceful carriage of the head. - I sought her, I have said, in hope. So it was for years; but now I should fear to see her; and her cough, which grieved me when I parted with her, is now my consolation. I now wish to see her no longer; but think of her, more gladly, as one long since laid in the grave; in the grave, I would hope, of a Magdalen; taken away, before injuries and cruelty had blotted out and transfigured her ingenuous nature, or the brutalities of ruffians had completed the ruin they had begun.
Thomas de Quincey
So Anna did not blame the women of her time for what they had created; it was different only in kind from what she had made herself. And if the old soldiers wanted only to forgive, Anna understood that, too, though in her own memory she could no longer find anything that needed forgiving. In the sunlight by her cousin’s grave, she would touch the black ostrich plume in her hat—the plume that, like herself, grew a little older and little more frayed every year—and think about what all of it meant to her. Down the hill slept the soldiers, and she would visit certain of them in a little while, and the thought of them—their faces, their voices, their particular ways—always made her smile. General Nathan Bedford Forrest himself told her once that she had seen the last of a great army, but he was wrong in that, for they still moved out there in the sunlight, all of them. He was right about one thing though: there was no shame in it, not ever.
Howard Bahr (The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War)
Your beast's little trick didn't work on me,' she said with quiet steel. 'Apparently, an iron will is all it takes to keep a glamour from digging in. So I had to watch as Father and Elain went from sobbing hysterics into nothing. I had to listen to them talk about how lucky it was for you to be taken to some made-up aunt's house, how some winter wind had shattered our door. And I thought I'd gone mad- but every time I did, I would look at that painted part of the table, then at the claw marks farther down, and know it wasn't in my head.' I'd never heard of a glamour not working. But Nesta's mind was so entirely her own; she had put up such strong walls- of steel and iron and ash wood- that even a High Lord's magic couldn't pierce them. 'Elain said- said you went to visit me, though. That you tried.' Nesta snorted, her face grave and full of that long-simmering anger that she could never master. 'He stole you away into the night, claiming some nonsense about the Treaty. And then everything went on as if it had never happened. It wasn't right. None of it was right.' My hands slackened at my sides. 'You went after me,' I said. 'You went after me- to Prythian.' 'I got to the wall. I couldn't find a way through.' I raised a shaking hand to my throat. 'You trekked two days there and two days back- through the winter woods?' She shrugged, looking at the sliver she'd pried from the table. 'I hired that mercenary from town to bring me a week after you were taken. With the money from your pelt. She was the only one who seemed like she would believe me.' 'You did that- for me?' Nesta's eyes- my eyes, our mother's eyes- met mine. 'It wasn't right,' she said again. Tamlin had been wrong when we'd discussed whether my father would have ever come after me- he didn't possess the courage, the anger. If anything, he would have hired someone to do it for him. But Nesta had gone with that mercenary. My hateful, cold sister had been willing to brave Prythian to rescue me. ... I looked at my sister, really looked at her, at this woman who couldn't stomach the sycophants who now surrounded her, who had never spent a day in the forest but had gone into wolf territory... Who had shrouded the loss of our mother, then our downfall, in icy rage and bitterness, because the anger had been a lifeline, the cruelty a release. But she had cared- beneath it, she had cared, and perhaps loved more fiercely that I could comprehend, more deeply and loyally.
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
To the Highland Girl of Inversneyde SWEET Highland Girl, a very shower Of beauty is thy earthly dower! Twice seven consenting years have shed Their utmost bounty on thy head: And these gray rocks, this household lawn, These trees—a veil just half withdrawn, This fall of water that doth make A murmur near the silent lake, This little bay, a quiet road That holds in shelter thy abode; In truth together ye do seem Like something fashion’d in a dream; Such forms as from their covert peep When earthly cares are laid asleep! But O fair Creature! in the light Of common day, so heavenly bright I bless Thee, Vision as thou art, I bless thee with a human heart: God shield thee to thy latest years! I neither know thee nor thy peers: And yet my eyes are fill’d with tears. With earnest feeling I shall pray For thee when I am far away; For never saw I mien or face In which more plainly I could trace Benignity and home-bred sense Ripening in perfect innocence. Here scatter’d, like a random seed, Remote from men, Thou dost not need The embarrass’d look of shy distress, And maidenly shamefacédness: Thou wear’st upon thy forehead clear The freedom of a mountaineer: A face with gladness overspread, Soft smiles, by human kindness bred; And seemliness complete, that sways Thy courtesies, about thee plays; With no restraint, but such as springs From quick and eager visitings Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach Of thy few words of English speech: A bondage sweetly brook’d, a strife That gives thy gestures grace and life! So have I, not unmoved in mind, Seen birds of tempest-loving kind, Thus beating up against the wind. What hand but would a garland cull For thee who art so beautiful? O happy pleasure! here to dwell Beside thee in some heathy dell; Adopt your homely ways, and dress, A shepherd, thou a shepherdess! But I could frame a wish for thee More like a grave reality: Thou art to me but as a wave Of the wild sea: and I would have Some claim upon thee, if I could, Though but of common neighbourhood. What joy to hear thee, and to see! Thy elder brother I would be, Thy father, anything to thee. Now thanks to Heaven! that of its grace Hath led me to this lonely place: Joy have I had; and going hence I bear away my recompense. In spots like these it is we prize Our memory, feel that she hath eyes: Then why should I be loth to stir? I feel this place was made for her; To give new pleasure like the past, Continued long as life shall last. Nor am I loth, though pleased at heart, Sweet Highland Girl! from thee to part; For I, methinks, till I grow old As fair before me shall behold As I do now, the cabin small, The lake, the bay, the waterfall; And Thee, the spirit of them all
William Wordsworth
As she lifted it, it caught the light and sent it out in a fan of intense colour. ‘Take this,’ Yollana said, and if there was a request in the two words, she hid it well. ‘Take this, and wear it. Travel this village, these lands. Speak to the people who make this your home. Visit your graves, your fields, your hills; find the shade in your forest, the cooling waters in your brook and small river.’ She let it fall; Ashaf gasped until she saw the glittering chain that stopped it from reaching the ground. A necklace or a pendant of some sort. She reached out an open palm, and Yollana carefully dropped the stone-for it was a stone, a clear one, like a diamond that would beggar even a Tyr-into her hand. At once, it flared with a deep, blue light; the light ran the length of her arm, shrouding it. Magic. ‘What-what does it do?’ Her voice was, momentarily, a girl’s voice-the girl that she had thought long gone. Dreamer. Seeker of wonder. ‘It is the Lady’s magic,’ Yollana replied, ‘not the Lord’s. It will not protect you; it will not defend you. Where a blade is raised or a spell is thrown, you will find no solace in it.’ Ashaf smiled wryly. ‘I did not ask you what it wasn’t. I asked you what it is.’ ‘It is a keeper’ Yollan said. ‘Of memory. Of affection. Of place. Wear it, as I have told you wear it, and it will take some of what you feel and hold it within depths that you cannot even imagine. Wear it, and you will feel exactly the peace or the joy or the quiet-yes, or the sorrow-that you felt when you donned it.’ ‘Why?’ ‘It is a piece of home,’ Yollana replied gravely. ‘Many of the Voyani women wear them, because the heart-our hearts-so seldom find a home, and when they do, we cannot remain there.
Michelle West (The Broken Crown (The Sun Sword, #1))
On a sloping promontory on its wooded north shore was a modestly sized building called the National Capital Exhibition, and I called there first, more in the hope of drying off a little than from any expectation of extending my education significantly. It was quite busy. In the front entrance, two friendly women were seated at a table handing out free visitors' packs - big, bright yellow plastic bags - and these were accepted with expressions of gratitude and rapture by everyone who passed. "Care for a visitors' pack, sir?" called one of the women to me. "Oh, yes, please," I said, more thrilled than I wish to admit. The visitors' pack was a weighty offering, but on inspection it proved to contain nothing but a mass of brochures - the complete works, it appeared, of the visitors' center I had visited the day before. The bag was so heavy that it stretched the handles until it was touching the floor. I dragged it around for a while and then thought to abandon it behind a potted plant. A here's the thing. There wasn't room behind the potted plant for another yellow bag! There must have been ninety of them there. I looked around and noticed that almost no one in the room still had a plastic bag. I leaned mine up against the wall beside the plant and as I straightened up I saw that a man was advancing toward me. "Is this where the bags go?" he asked gravely. "Yes, it is." I replied with equal gravity. In my momentary capacity as director of internal operations I watched him lean the bag carefully against the wall. Then we stood for a moment together and regarded it judiciously, pleased to have contributed to the important work of moving hundreds of yellow bags from the foyer to a mustering station in the next room. As we stood, two more people came along, "Put them just there," we suggested, almost in unison, and indicated where we were sandbagging the wall. Then we exchanged satisfied nods and moved off into the museum.
Bill Bryson
saw nothing finer or more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave. That illustrious place of pilgrimage lies out of the way, alone in the middle of the woods. A narrow footpath leads to the mound, nothing but a rectangle of soil raised above ground level, with no one guarding or keeping watch on it, only two huge trees casting their shade. Leo Tolstoy planted those trees himself, so his granddaughter told me beside his grave. When he and his brother Nikolai were boys, they had heard one of the village women say that a place where you planted trees would be a happy one. So they planted two saplings, partly as a kind of game. Only later did the old man remember that promise of happiness, and then he expressed a wish to be buried under the trees he had planted. And his wish was carried out. In its heart-rending simplicity, his grave is the most impressive place of burial in the world. Just a small rectangular mound in the woods with trees overhead, no cross, no tombstone, no inscription. The great man who suffered more than anyone from his own famous name and reputation lies buried there, nameless, like a vagabond who happened to be found nearby or an unknown soldier. No one is forbidden to visit his last resting place; the flimsy wooden fence around it is not kept locked. Nothing guards that restless man’s final rest but human respect for him. While curious sightseers usually throng around the magnificence of a tomb, the compelling simplicity of this place banishes any desire to gape. The wind rushes like the word of God over the nameless grave, and no other voice is heard. You could pass the place without knowing any more than that someone is buried here, a Russian lying in Russian earth. Napoleon’s tomb beneath the marble dome of Les Invalides, Goethe’s in the grand-ducal vault at Weimar, the tombs in Westminster Abbey are none of them as moving as this silent and movingly anonymous grave somewhere in the woods, with only the wind whispering around it, uttering no word or message of its own.
Stefan Zweig (The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European)
I was brought up with a Jewish prejudice against Samaritans,” she told Silas, “and you must forgive me if it has taken all these years for me to overcome it.” “I must ask your forgiveness too, Princess,” Silas replied, “—forgiveness, I mean, for my bluntness of speech. But such is my nature. I must take the liberty of saying that if your Jewish friends and relatives were in general a little less upright and a little more charitable I would like them better. A cousin of mine was once riding on business from Jerusalem to Jericho. He came upon a poor Jew lying wounded and naked in the hot sun by the roadside. He had been set on by bandits. My cousin cleansed his wounds and bound them up as best he could and then took him on his beast to the nearest inn, where he paid in advance for his room and his food for a few days—the innkeeper insisted on payment in advance—and then visited him on his way back from Jericho and helped him to get home. Well, that was nothing: we Samaritans are made that way. It was all in a day’s work for my cousin. But the joke was that three or four well-to-do Jews—a priest among them—whom my cousin had met riding towards him just before he came on the wounded man, must have actually seen him lying by the roadside: but because he was no relation of theirs they had left him there to die and ridden on, though he was groaning and calling out for help most pitifully. The innkeeper was a Jew too. He told my cousin that he quite understood the reluctance of these travellers to attend to the wounded man; if he had died on their hands they would have become ritually unclean from touching a corpse, which would have been a great inconvenience to themselves and their families. The priest, the innkeeper explained, was probably on his way to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple: he, least of all, could risk pollution. Well, thank God, I am a Samaritan, and a man with a blunt tongue. I say what I think. I—” Herod interrupted, “My dear Cypros, isn’t that a most instructive story? And if the poor fellow had been a Samaritan he wouldn’t have had enough money to make it worth the bandits’ while to rob him.
Robert Graves (Claudius The God: And His Wife Messalina)
Franklin also combined science and mechanical practicality by devising the first urinary catheter used in America, which was a modification of a European invention. His brother John in Boston was gravely ill and wrote Franklin of his desire for a flexible tube to help him urinate. Franklin came up with a design, and instead of simply describing it he went to a Philadelphia silversmith and oversaw its construction. The tube was thin enough to be flexible, and Franklin included a wire that could be stuck inside to stiffen it while it was inserted and then be gradually withdrawn as the tube reached the point where it needed to bend. His catheter also had a screw component that allowed it to be inserted by turning, and he made it collapsible so that it would be easier to withdraw. “Experience is necessary for the right using of all new tools or instruments, and that will perhaps suggest some improvements,” Franklin told his brother. The study of nature also continued to interest Franklin. Among his most noteworthy discoveries was that the big East Coast storms known as northeasters, whose winds come from the northeast, actually move in the opposite direction from their winds, traveling up the coast from the south. On the evening of October 21, 1743, Franklin looked forward to observing a lunar eclipse he knew was to occur at 8:30. A violent storm, however, hit Philadelphia and blackened the sky. Over the next few weeks, he read accounts of how the storm caused damage from Virginia to Boston. “But what surprised me,” he later told his friend Jared Eliot, “was to find in the Boston newspapers an account of the observation of that eclipse.” So Franklin wrote his brother in Boston, who confirmed that the storm did not hit until an hour after the eclipse was finished. Further inquiries into the timing of this and other storms up and down the coast led him to “the very singular opinion,” he told Eliot, “that, though the course of the wind is from the northeast to the southwest, yet the course of the storm is from the southwest to the northeast.” He further surmised, correctly, that rising air heated in the south created low-pressure systems that drew winds from the north. More than 150 years later, the great scholar William Morris Davis proclaimed, “With this began the science of weather prediction.”4 Dozens of other scientific phenomena also engaged Franklin’s interest during this period. For example, he exchanged letters with his friend Cadwallader Colden on comets, the circulation of blood, perspiration, inertia, and the earth’s rotation. But it was a parlor-trick show in 1743 that launched him on what would be by far his most celebrated scientific endeavor. ELECTRICITY On a visit to Boston in the summer of 1743, Franklin happened to be entertained one evening by
Walter Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life)
For these families, the wounds of conflict have been especially hard to heal. For them there have been no joyous reunions, nor even the solace of certainty ratified by a flag-draped casket and the solemn sound of taps. There has been no grave to visit and often no peace from gnawing doubt. To them, there has been only the search for answers through years when they did not have active and viable support from their own government to the present day when our ability to get real answers has finally been enhanced, but ineffective and disappointing."— an excerpt from Vietnam War: Through My Eyes, Clarence Vold.
Clarence Vold
Seated at her desk the next morning, Tina made a note of what she knew about Chrissie and Billy. She knew that Billy had lived at 180 Gillbent Road, Manchester, but did not know his surname. She knew where Chrissie had lived and the names of her parents, and that her mother had been killed in the blackout. If she visited Mabel Skinner’s grave, she would be able to find out her date of birth. Maud Cutler had said that Chrissie had been sent to live with Dr Skinner’s sister-in-law in Ireland – that must be Mabel’s sister. Tina felt an unexpected rush of excitement at the thought of playing detective. It was a welcome diversion from her other problems
Kathryn Hughes (The Letter)
If you're going to act crazy, be committed.
Kurt Deion (Presidential Grave Hunter: One Kid's Quest to Visit the Tombs of Every President and Vice President)
Nesta pursed her lips. “I know the type.” Her mother’s mother had been the same way before she’d died of a deep-rooted cough that had turned into a deadly infection. Nesta had been seven when the stern-faced dame who had insisted on being called Grandmamma had beaten her palms raw with a ruler for missteps in her dancing lessons. Worthless, clumsy girl. You’re a waste of my time. Maybe this will help you remember to pay attention to my orders. Nesta had only felt relief when the old beast had died. Elain, who’d been spared the cruelties of Grandmamma’s tutelage, had wept and dutifully laid flowers at her grave—one soon joined by their mother’s stone marker. Feyre had been too young to understand, but Nesta had never bothered to lay flowers for her grandmamma. Not when Nesta bore a scar near her left thumb from one of the woman’s nastier punishments. Nesta had only left flowers for her mother, whose grave she had visited more often than she cared to admit. She hadn’t once visited her father’s grave outside Velaris.
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #4))
How does the greatest detective in Joseon go missing? Where is the body? How can he be dead when there is no grave to visit?
June Hur (The Forest of Stolen Girls)
The dead here seem really dead, and bone lonely, unlike the graves in Italian cemeteries, bedecked with fresh flowers, red votive lights, and photos of the deceased. I always imagine that they must rise at night and visit among themselves, the way they used to in the piazza. I did cry over Absalom, Absalom!
Frances Mayes (Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir)
the early 1970s, integration was beginning to filter into everyday life in Monroe. So, after visiting the graves of his mother and father and his big brother Madison, Robert decided to walk into a diner that used to be only for white people. It was a place he could only have dreamed of entering as a young man. He sat down without incident, ordered and ate, and nobody commented on it one way or the other. It was nothing special and, in fact, underwhelming after all those years of being denied entrance and dreaming of being inside. How could it be that people were fighting to the death over something that was, in the end, so very ordinary? He had crossed into territory forbidden him growing up, and now the circle was complete. It was much like returning to a building that had seemed so imposing when you were a child but was, in fact, small and forgettable when seen through the eyes of an adult.
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
The other queens indeed fled from Briallyn weeks ago, as Eris said. She alone sits in the throne room of their shared palace. And what Eris revealed about Beron was true, too: the High Lord visited Briallyn on the continent, pledging his forces to her cause.” A muscle ticked in Azriel’s jaw. “But Briallyn’s gathering of armies, the alliance with Beron, is only the auxiliary force to what she has planned.” He shook his head, shadows slithering over his wings. “Briallyn wishes to find the Cauldron again. In order to retrieve her youth.” “She’ll never attain the Cauldron,” Amren said, waving a hand gleaming with rings. “No one but us, Miryam, and Drakon know where it’s hidden. Even if Briallyn did uncover its location, there are enough wards and spells on it that no one could ever break through.” “Briallyn knows this,” Azriel said gravely. Nesta’s stomach churned. Azriel nodded to Cassian. “What Vassa suspected is true. The death-lord Koschei has been whispering in Briallyn’s ear. He remains trapped at his lake, but his words carry on the wind to her. He is ancient, his depth of knowledge fathomless. He pointed Briallyn toward the Dread Trove—not for her sake, but for his own ends. He wishes to use it to free himself from his lake. And Briallyn is not the puppet we believed her to be—she and Koschei are allies.” He added to Cassian, “You need to ask Eris whether Beron knows about this. And the Trove.” Cassian nodded into the ensuing silence. Nesta found herself asking, “What’s the Dread Trove?” Amren’s eyes glowed with a remnant of her power. “The Cauldron Made many objects of power, long ago, forging weapons of unrivaled might. Most were lost to history and war, and when I went into the Prison, only three remained. At the time, some claimed there were four, or that the fourth had been Unmade, but today’s legends only tell of three.
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #4))
Fine, fine,” Phaedra huffed. “I’m rather famous in some circles for having special talents. I can steal the secrets that people take to their graves. Havelock here thought that if I paid our prince’s corpse a visit, I might learn some of his secrets, including who killed him. But Apollo didn’t have any secrets. And everyone has secrets, even if it’s just a secret fear of caterpillars or a tiny white lie they told to a neighbor. That’s when we realized Apollo wasn’t dead. Whatever toxin was used on him didn’t kill him, it put him in this suspended state.” “What’s a suspended state?” Evangeline asked. “It pauses life,” Phaedra said. “Unless he’s revived, Prince Apollo could stay like this for centuries without aging. There aren’t a lot of stories about it. It’s believed Honora Valor used to use it as part of her healing—for people who she couldn’t help immediately. Unfortunately, no one knows how she did it or how to wake someone up from it. The practice of it was believed to have been lost with her death. But we thought you might be able to help.” Phaedra looked up at Evangeline the same way people had looked at her right after she’d returned from being stone, as if she were the hero the papers all claimed.
Stephanie Garber (Once Upon a Broken Heart (Once Upon a Broken Heart, #1))
Our visit happened to coincide with the celebration of the birth of King Hassan’s first son, Prince Mohammed. He had been born in August, so why wait until October to celebrate, I wondered. I learned it was a Moroccan custom to keep an open grave for forty days after a child’s birth, until the health of the mother and baby is ensured. After learning this, I wondered how Mrs. Kennedy felt, having lost Patrick only two months earlier, but she showed no open signs of grief.
Paul Landis (The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After Sixty Years)
By 2000, RMS Titanic Inc. had returned to the site four more times, using French or Russian submersibles. In a game of Finders Keepers, they pocketed more than 6,000 artifacts and displayed them in a museum, charging people to see them. The company even broadcast a documentary showing how it took the objects. All told, the items included eyeglasses, shoes, handbags, luggage, and even a bronze cherub statue from the Grand Staircase. A bell and a light from the foremast were removed, and the salvagers even raised a chunk of the hull weighing 18 tons. They sold pieces of coal from the engine room for $25 a block. They created a website, so you could peruse the collections online. Documentary filmmakers and wealthy sightseers visited the site in mini-subs. And, perhaps most grotesque of all, a couple were married in a submersible perched on Titanic’s bow. I wouldn’t think of a mass grave as romantic, but I guess some couples are into that.
Robert D. Ballard (Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic)
Dr. Larson after visiting the grave, he explained that the battle I had between selves was because I had an identity fugue that allowed me to assume a new identity while still maintaining a true identity.
Lucinda Berry (Phantom Limb)
Some people really like to talk about honoring the past for what it did to make us. And while I basically understand what they mean by that and why they need to say it, I still think the sentiment is an overflowing bucket of bullshit. Sure, it may be perfectly fine for folks with pristine memories, but it leaves the rest of us dealing with the implication that all of the pain or trauma or damage we suffered along the way was somehow essential to who we eventually became. That the hurt made us stronger, or that the loss gave as much as it took. That we are who we are because of our damage and not in spite of it. And that just sucks as a philosophy. It’s a kind of societal shrug at the worst tragedies, as if to say we can’t do anything about them so we might as well attach some ephemeral pride to having survived. I don’t know. Do whatever works for you, I guess. But I for one don’t feel born from my past so much as resurrected from it. So while I might visit the grave of that life now and then, I’m certainly not wasting any money on flowers.
Josh Erikson (Dawn Razed (Ethereal Earth, #4))
We can walk his last steps. We can retrieve his bones to be laid to rest next to his mother’s. But we’ll still never know everything that happened to Tim. Sooner or later, his father and his friends will have to come to terms with that. That the quality of their future sleep won’t be determined by a visit to his grave, but by their ability to let go.
Lisa Gardner (One Step Too Far (Frankie Elkin, #2))
The harness of motherhood chafes my skin, and yet, occasionally I find a predictable integrity in it too, a freedom of a different sort: from complexity and choice and from the reams of unscripted time upon which I used to write my days, bearing the burden of their authorship. It does not escape me that in this last sentiment I am walking over the grave of my sex. The state of motherhood speaks to my native fear of achievement. It is a demotion, a displacement, an opportunity to give up. I have the sense of history watching, from its club chair, my response to this demotion with some amusement. Will I give in, graciously, gratefully, handing back my life as something I had on loan? Or will I put up a fight? Like moving back from the city to the small town where you were born, before exclaiming at its tedium you are advised to remember that other people live here, have always lived here. Men, when they visit, are constrained by no such considerations of tact. But it is not merely a taboo against complaint that makes the hardship of motherhood inadmissible: like all loves this one has a conflicted core, a grain of torment that buffs the pearl of pleasure; unlike other loves, this conflict has no possibility of resolution.
Rachel Cusk (A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother)
As America suffered from the Depression, Kansas City soared, thanks to the Ten-Year Plan. “In Kansas City,” said Conrad Mann, the president of the chamber of commerce, “we are building the greatest inland city the world has ever seen.” New skyscrapers sprouted from the ground every year, and jazz clubs rollicked into the morning, at a time when, as one agent put it, the rest of the country “couldn’t afford three dollars a night for a musician.” Pendergast liked to think generosity was at the core of his power. When a British parliamentarian named Marjorie Graves visited his Main Street office in 1933, he told her he helped “the poor through our organizations.” It was true that Tom’s Town was built on undervalued workers—immigrants, Black labor, the poor. “The Boss” hosted a fancy dinner for the needy every Christmas and kept quarters in his pockets for the homeless. By the early 1930s, with police brutality against the Black community on the rise, Pendergast seized control of the Kansas City Police Department, taking it back from the state of Missouri, which had assumed leadership in the Civil War era. Pendergast assigned staffing oversight to “Brother John” Lazia, the leader of the Fifth Democratic Ward and a charismatic crime boss, and when dozens more loyal Pendergast supporters were appointed to the force, The Kansas City Call reported that police brutality had declined. But Pendergast’s Ten-Year Plan funds rarely made it to Black communities, and the occasional gifts from his patronage system masked the need for lasting racial reforms.
Mark Dent (Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once Swingin' Cow Town Chasedthe Ultimate Comeback)
I loved my little grandmother Hwang with her wooden leg. She never got upset with me, even when I cried and pestered her to carry me on her back like a horse. She was a wonderful storyteller; I would sit with her for hours as she told me about her childhood in the South. ... Most of her stories were from the time of Chosun, when there was no North or South Korea, only one country, one people. She told me we had the same culture and shared the same traditions as the South. She also told me a little bit about the time she visited Seoul, although even saying the name was forbidden in North Korea. You just didn't mention such an evil place. I knew it existed only from propaganda, newspaper articles describing anti-imperialist demonstrations by its oppressed masses. But somehow my grandmother planted deep inside me a curiosity about this place she had loved. She told me, "Come to my grave someday, and tell me that the North and South are reunited.
Yeonmi Park (In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom)
I can't visit his grave because I'm afraid of the guilt, and I'm drowning in the grief.
Orly Konig (Carousel Beach)
How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors’ toil, without mortal consequence? Somehow that raw question had not previously penetrated the consciousness of the refugees who had become confused in the rank eternity of waiting, pining at abstract international resolutions, resistance, and struggle. But that basic axiom of their condition sprang to the surface as they lowered Yehya’s body into the ground, and night brought them no sleep.
Susan Abulhawa (Mornings in Jenin)
Not to be afraid.’ Lise came often to visit Lucette’s grave and sat by her as if they were still talking. ‘Do not be afraid.’ How often had Jesus had to say those words to his disciples as, in this little cemetery, Lise said them to Lucette. It was the old habit of reassuring, though Lucette, Lise was sure, was now far wiser than she. ‘Though earth closes over you or, even, as nowadays, you are burned to ashes and scattered, it is wonderful,’ whispered Lise. ‘Listen. Listen, there are a million tiny voices and movements, rustling, crumbling, disintegrating, disappearing, as you become one with creation. Your body will be earth, water, wind, stars.’ Lise knew that would happen to her too and it did not frighten her – she liked to think of it. Lucette herself was in God’s keeping; Lise was sure of that too. How? When? That did not matter. We are not meant to know. We can only try and live as if we knew.
Rumer Godden (Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy)
In August 2014, I became an American citizen, twenty years after I first came to live in the United States. My first trip out of the country was to Mexico. It was a very emotional trip. I was finally back in the country of my birth. Mama Silvia had also passed away, and she and my dad are buried in the same place. I visited their graves and gave them thanks for all the sacrifices they made for me. As
Julissa Arce (Someone Like Me: How One Undocumented Girl Fought for Her American Dream)
Do you want to know what I thought the first time I saw you? It was the week before at the cemetery. I was visiting a friend’s grave and you were a few plots over, standing there in a blue dress with peacock feather earrings. It’s why I always left those in your books. They made me think of you. You were crying, and I couldn’t help but wonder what could make a girl that pretty look so sad.
Eva Simmons (Lies Like Love (Twisted Roses #1))
MY TEARS DRIED up on the fiftieth anniversary visit to Omaha when I got thinking of how presumptuous it was of some Army authority to have put nothing but crosses or Stars of David over the graves, as though there was no room in the cemetery for anyone who held beliefs other than those represented by two religious symbols.
Andy Rooney (My War)
The way I’ve avoided visiting Ama’s grave, even though I know she’s probably lonely
Sabaa Tahir (All My Rage)
According to cemetery industry statistics, the average grave receives just two visits in its lifetime—total,
Anonymous
A week later the British Commissioner, Captain H. N. Davies, wrote to London to report what had passed, adding: Have since visited the remaining State Prisoners – the very scum of the reduced Asiatic harem; found all correct. None of the family appear much affected by the death of the bed-ridden old man. His death was evidently due to pure decrepitude and paralysis in the region of the throat. He expired at 5 o’clock on the morning of the funeral. The death of the ex-King may be said to have had no effect on the Mahomedan part of the populace of Rangoon, except perhaps for a few fanatics who watch and pray for the final triumph of Islam. A bamboo fence surrounds the grave for some considerable distance, and by the time the fence is worn out, the grass will again have properly covered the spot, and no vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.
William Dalrymple (The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857)
He watched the old man pick up his naked, violated daughter from where she lay in the dirt. He held her in his arms, her limbs lolling, his head bent to hers as if in silent prayer. He was going to bury her, bury his daughter, perhaps in a peaceful place, and he would say a prayer to his gods over her grave. He would visit his daughter’s grave in the months afterwards, until he too succumbed to disease, overwork or torture. People said slaves did not have souls and were a step removed from people. Zachary watched the old black man in ragged clothes walk away with his dead daughter. In that instant, the differences between Bonnie Valley and Paradise became excuses, mere matters of degree, the difference between twenty-nine strokes of the cowskin lash and thirty strokes, the difference between a bed and a filthy floor after torture, between rape and rape, death now and death tomorrow. There was no difference.
Diana McCaulay (Huracan)
The ultimate symbol of our religious devotion isn’t our churches, though it’s often beside them. In the South, we understand cemeteries as our final reward, and as Grits, we understand the importance of keeping them in shape. We visit the graves of our ancestors often, especially on a Sunday, and pray for their souls. We picnic in Confederate cemeteries, with their weather-worn memorials, and remember the sacrifices and sins of our past. Cemeteries are sacred ground in the South. They are the place where faith, family, history, and community meet. We can’t think of a better definition of the true power of Southern religion.
Deborah Ford (Grits (Girls Raised in the South) Guide to Life)
I remember at that time I went to the hairdresser's. I did this regularly, but I remember that visit for two particular reasons. The first was that next to me was a young mother with a little girl aged about three. The child, whose hair was about to be cut for the first time, screamed with terror and clung to her mother. The hairdresser stood by gravely, comb in hand: he recognised that this was a serious moment. The mother, blushing, tried to comfort the child who had suddenly plunged into despair; all around the shop women smiled in sympathy. What impressed me, and what I particularly remember, was the child's passionate attempt to re-enter her mother, the arms locked around the woman's neck, the terrified cries of unending love. So dangerous is it to be so close! I had tears in my eyes, witnessing that bond, seeing that closeness, of which only a sorrowful memory remained in my own life. One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilised, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.
Anita Brookner (Brief Lives)
The rage roaring through his veins stumbled. And stumbled again when she chewed on her lip. “I need you to come with me today.” “Anywhere you need to go,” he said. She looked toward the table, at the stove. “To Arobynn?” He hadn’t forgotten for one second where they would be going tonight—what she would be facing. She shook her head, then shrugged. “No—I mean, yes, I want you to come tonight, but … There’s something else I need to do. And I want to do today, before everything happens.” He waited, restraining himself from going to her, from asking her to tell him more. That had been their promise to each other: space to sort out their own miserable lives—to sort out how to share them. He didn’t mind. Most of the time. She rubbed at her brows with her thumb and forefinger, and when she squared her shoulders—those silk-clad shoulders that bore a weight he’d do anything to relieve—she lifted her chin. “There’s a grave I need to visit.
Sarah J. Maas (Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass, #4))
Jean-Claude sent me a dozen pure white, long-stemmed roses. The card read, “If you have answered the question truthfully, come dancing with me.” I wrote “No” on the back of the card and slipped it under the door at Guilty Pleasures, during daylight hours. I had been attracted to Jean-Claude. Maybe I still was. So what? He thought it changed things. It didn’t. All I had to do was visit Phillip’s grave to know that. Oh, hell, I didn’t even have to go that far. I know who and what I am. I am The Executioner, and I don’t date vampires. I kill them.
Laurell K. Hamilton (Guilty Pleasures (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #1))
She could remember him at church, sitting with his family in the second pew, behind her and her mother. She had worn her hair in long braids as a child, and she had liked to toss the braids over the back of the seat, where they would not dig into her back. One Sunday morning she had been forced to sit through most of her father’s lengthy sermon with her head tilted back at an unnatural angle while Christopher’s knee had kept her braid held firmly against the back of the pew. She had been released finally, she remembered, a moment after hearing the sound of a swift slap immediately behind her. And then there had been the time when Mrs. Sinclair had been visiting at the parsonage and the children had wandered outside. She remembered sitting on a tombstone in the churchyard, finally too terrified either to get down or to turn her head as Christopher stood in front of her, very seriously and sincerely describing the ghosts that came out of the graves at midnight. For many nights after that she had awoken Mama with her screams as she struggled out of some nightmare. Rebecca was very thankful to peel off her remaining clothes when the water finally arrived and to climb into the bathtub and soak in the lukewarm suds. It had been just such a day when she had finally realized that both she and Christopher were
Mary Balogh (The Constant Heart)
Wine is essential after a visit to Chuck E. Cheese’s. They should really give you a bottle on your way out.
Tracey Garvis Graves (Every Time I Think of You)
After six long hours of driving and three rest stops, Tiger pulls up to a snow-topped, metal speaker box just outside the State Penitentiary's first gate in Walla Walla. As he rolls down his window and snow flies in his face, Joshua starts begging for a Happy Meal. I turn around, snapping at him. "This ISN'T MCDONALDS and YOU AREN'T HUNGRY. NOW SHUT UP BRAT." A loud scratchy masculine voice blasts out of the speaker. "CAN I HELP YOU?" Tiger leans out the window, as he answers- We're here to visit Raven Chandler. "HAVE YOU BEEN HERE BEFORE?" "Yes sir. I've been here A LOT." "WHERE'S HIS MOTHER?" "I don't know.. I haven't seen her in months." "NOT THE PRISONER'S MOTHER. THE BRAT IN THE BACK SEAT OF YOUR JEEP." "Oh- HIM-" As he turns, smiling and sticking his tongue out at Joshua, I lean towards his window to answer the guard's question. "SHE'S IN VEGAS, SIR. I'M BABYSITTING. HE'S MY GODSON." When the speaker remains disturbingly silent for far too long, I continue. "HE'S A GOOD BOY SIR. HE WON'T BE ANY TROUBLE- I SWEAR." "THAT'S RIGHT," Tiger said. "HE SWEARS ON THE LITTLE BRAT'S MOTHER'S GRAVE.
Giorge Leedy (Uninhibited From Lust To Love)
Some moments will often visit us.. Some will happen merely once in our life time…that won’t be a wonderful one.. That we build it wonderful with all our mind.. Those I am picking up in life to carry till my grave- to memorize in quick look with a sparkle till last breath..Wish to live in those treasured moments forever…
Manjula Jyothiprakash
One unusual fringe benefit of time travel is the ability to visit your own grave. Personally I find the practice a tad morbid, but I do get some satisfaction from the fact that the disproportionate dates on my tombstones have confounded many a passerby.” -Excerpt from the journal of Harold Quickly, 1897   “Get
Nathan Van Coops (In Times Like These (In Times Like These, #1))
opportunity of comparing the San Francisco of 1852 with that of 1853. As before stated, there had been but one wharf in front of the city in 1852 – Long Wharf. In 1853 the town had grown out into the bay beyond what was the end of this wharf when I first saw it. Streets and houses had been built out on piles where the year before the largest vessels visiting the port lay at anchor or tied to the wharf. There was no filling under the streets or houses. San Francisco presented the same general appearance as the year before; that is, eating, drinking and gambling houses were conspicuous for their number and publicity. They were on the first floor, with doors wide open. At all hours of the day and night in walking the streets, the eye was regaled, on every block near the water front, by the sight of players at faro. Often broken places were found in the street, large enough to let a man down into the water below. I have but little doubt that many of the people who went to the Pacific coast in the early days of the gold excitement, and have never been heard from since, or who were heard from for a time and then ceased to write, found watery graves beneath the houses or streets built over San Francisco Bay.
Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs)
expansion of antidiscrimination laws, in turn, reflects a shift in the primary justification for such laws from the practical, relatively limited goal of redressing harms visited upon previously oppressed groups, especially African Americans, to a moralistic agenda aimed at eliminating all forms of invidious discrimination. Such an extraordinarily ambitious goal cannot possibly be achieved—or even vigorously pursued—without grave consequences for civil liberties.
David E. Berstein (You Can't Say That!: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws)
drove by Copley Square, Fenway Park, Harvard Square, and many other historic sites before stopping to wander through Granary Burying Ground. There they visited the snow-covered graves of John Hancock, Sam Adams, Paul Revere, members of Benjamin Franklin’s family, and many others from America’s earliest days. Trevor looked at his watch. “We’re going to have to scoot to make our reservation at Mistral.
Diane Moody (At Legend's End (The Teacup Novellas, #4))
That first doctor’s visit was a chilling introduction to the world of bone marrow transplants. This particular doctor was all doom and gloom. She spent so much time telling me about the high mortality rate of having a bone marrow transplant that I half-expected her to end the appointment by handing me a shovel and telling me to go ahead and start digging my own grave. One thing that I understood very clearly from her words was that with the transplant, timing was everything. You don’t want to wait too long to do the transplant, but you also have to make sure that you time it so that you are ready—mind, body and soul—to take the risk of the procedure. Do you remember that dot on the graph that the first oncologist had shown me? The “if I do nothing, I have between one and two years to live” dot? If the transplant did not go well, if I contracted a serious virus after completely wiping out my immune system, then I could die within weeks or even days after the procedure.
Robin Roberts (Everybody's Got Something)
In the end, after advice from the Foreign Office, she decided make a three-day visit to Bosnia, still slowly recovering from civil war, in the company of the distinguished journalist Lord Deedes. He recalled not only her gentle sense of humour but her ability to listen and to communicate the uncommunicable. When she walked around Sarajevo’s largest cemetery she encountered a mother tending her son’s grave. ‘There was no language barrier,’ he wrote. ‘The two women gently embraced. Watched this scene from a distance, I sought in my mind who else could have done this. Nobody.
Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
Then came the afternoon at Mrs. Groton's when Mrs. Brown saw the dress and jacket that took her breath away and the idea was born in her. This is what she felt she needed: a dress as strong as armor. She believed the dress would carry her with dignity and grace specifically on Sundays, when she visited Robbie's grave. This is what I must wear.
William Norwich
story of Private Stephen Kelly of Co. E, 91st Pennsylvania. He joined that unit in August 1861, and was mustered out three years later in Philadelphia. Several years after the war Kelly had occasion to visit the battlefield park and was surprised to find his own grave, (#A-88) nicely defined in the Pennsylvania section of the National Cemetery. It is there today, but Kelly was not in it. He took the whole matter in stride and in good humor, and was once heard to say: “[E]ach Decoration Day I go up there and strew some flowers on the tomb of the man who is substituting for me.
Gregory A. Coco (A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg: The Aftermath of a Battle)
your shoulders raise to your ears around any man who looks like he could kill you & not say a word for the rest of his life. he would even visit your grave, leave flowers, & send his condolences to your mother. he is the good guy here. he is the good guy you let into your life & into your heart & then without having a say, into your body.
Bryan Scavo (I Should Want Him Dead)
boring” but correct results. Survivorship bias means this: People systematically overestimate their chances of success. Guard against it by frequently visiting the graves of once-promising projects, investments, and careers. It is a sad walk but one that should clear your mind.
Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly)
Survivorship bias means this: People systematically overestimate their chances of success. Guard against it by frequently visiting the graves of once-promising projects, investments, and careers. It is a sad walk but one that should clear your mind.
Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly)
when you visit a place you used to live in for a long time, you see it differently; you become more like a tourist in your own land.
Peter Robinson (Cold Is the Grave (Inspector Banks #11))
Boethius was killed, as he feared, a few months after being imprisoned. His grave lies in the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia, half an hour from Milan. In his honour, we should leave space for Lady Philosophy occasionally to come and visit us – and, when we are facing the worst turns of Fortune’s wheel, let her strengthen our resolve to depend a little less on what was, in fact, never really ours to rely upon.
The School of Life (Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind)
When I was 55, I went to Poland and learned that my mother’s five brothers died because of prostate cancer, each when they were close to 55 years old. As I stood looking at the grave of one of them, I realized I was 55 myself. When I returned to the States, I immediately visited my doctor, who informed me that my prostate was large and had nodules. She tested my PSA, and after seeing the result of 9.5, she sent me to the urologist. He was very fast and forceful with his recommendation: biopsy and possible removal. “Wait, wait,” I said. “Let me think about it.” The doctor urged me to make a quick decision, but I wanted to do some research first. The whole next week, I studied the literature about my condition and decided to change my diet, incorporating many more vegetables, before taking drastic medical action. The result? After six months my PSA was down to 5, and after another six months it reached 1. Another half a year later it hit 0.1, and it has been like this every year since.
Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Transformative Wisdom From Icons and Innovators to Help You Navigate Life's Challenges)
Tonight in Crooked Path, we’ll all visit our dear ones’ graves and lay wreaths made of apostrophes: the symbol of something missing.
Duchess Goldblatt (Becoming Duchess Goldblatt)
But few gain sufficient experience in Wall Street to command sucess until they reach that period of life in which they have one foot in the grave. When this time comes these old veterans of the Street usually spend long intervals of repose at their comfortable homes, and in times of panic, which recur sometimes oftener than once a year, these old fellows will be seen in Wall Street, hobbling down on their canes to their brokers' office. Then they always buy good stocks to the extent of their bank balances, which have been permitted to accumulate for just such an emergency. The panic usually rages until enough of these cash purchases of stock is made to afford a big "rake in." When the panic has spent its force, these old fellows, who have been resting judiciously on their oars in expectation of the inevitable event, which usually returns with the regularity of the seasons, quickly realize, deposit their profits with their bankers, or the overplus thereof, after purchasing more real estate that is on the upgrade, for permanent investment, and retire for another season to the quietude of their splendid homes and the bosoms of their happy families. If young men had only the patience to watch the speculative signs of the times, as manifested in the periodical egress of these old prophetic speculators from their shells of security, they would make more money at these intervals than by following up the slippery "tips" of the professional "pointers" of the Stock Exchange all the year round, and they would feel no necessity for hanging at the coat tails, around the hotels, of those specious frauds, who pretend to be deep in the councils of the big operations and of all the new "pools" in process of formation. I say to the young speculators, therefore, watch the ominous visits to the Street of these old men. They are as certain to be seen on the eve of a panic as spiders creeping stealthily and noiselessly from their cobwebs just before rain.
Henry Clews (Fifty Years in Wall Street (Wiley Investment Classics))
He said, “God will make this location a place for the gathering of my Shia followers and friends.” He then swore by God, “Anyone of them who visits my grave or salutes me, will be blessed by God’s mercy and forgiveness.” The Imam prayed there and ended his prayers with a long prostration.
Mahdi Maghrebi (A Historical Research on the Lives of the 12 Shia Imams)
Please don’t steal my body. I want my friends to visit my grave. You’re not dying, Rhia, hold on. Stars, please hold on.
Victoria Vredevoogd (A Legend of Golden Shadows)
Not flowers—never flowers in Terrasen. Instead, they carried small stones to graves to mark their visits, to tell the dead that they still remembered. Stones were eternal—flowers were not.
Sarah J. Maas (Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass, #4))
In most human cultures there is a festival of reckoning. We honor our dead with food and flowers. Parade red flags and skulls through the streets or visit graves. We use the smoke of incense and sage. We create careful tableaux of heaven and of hell. Bringing the dead to life again, we let their spirits roam. We remember and trace the signals of their actions on the living. Then we burn them up and set them free and tell them not to bother us. It never works. By the following year they’re always back.
Louise Erdrich (The Sentence: A Novel)
Graves are for the living, not the dead. So take your time getting over there. I doubt your big sister would want you to risk your own life to visit her corpse.
C.M. Stunich (Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys, #5))
The problem with every plot looking the same, though, is that, for visitors – loved ones wishing to mourn a parent, child or grandparent – finding exactly the right grave is always a bit of a pot-luck situation. Each time I visit Mum, I am sure I know where she is, but invariably end up at the wrong plot.
Tufayel Ahmed (This Way Out)
Survivorship bias means this: people systematically overestimate their chances of success. Guard against it by frequently visiting the graves of once-promising projects, investments and careers. It is a sad walk, but one that should clear your
Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly: The Secrets of Perfect Decision-Making)
I have for you braised and fried chicken feet, served with buffalo sauce, a salad of cauliflower rubble and grated celery, and a blue cheese mascarpone cream." Luke's face lit up as he saw the chicken feet, the exact opposite expressions of Lenore and Maz, who looked very much as if they were at an actual graveyard and had seen an actual claw shoot up from the grave. "It reminds me of dakbal," he breathed, and he sounded for a moment as if it were just the two of us sitting side by side in that Korean speakeasy, shoulder touching shoulder. Unconsciously, I took a step toward him. "My halmoni used to make dakbal as a snack when we visited her in Korea. She'd steam them first, then panfry them until they were charred, and then there was the secret sauce she made, all garlicky and gingery and tingling with gochugaru..." As he trailed off, I could almost taste his grandmother's chicken feet. The chew of the meat after the crisp of the char. The caramelization of the sugars on the skin, and the nose-running spiciness of the sauce. "I didn't know you were Korean," said Maz. That broke the mood. I stepped back, clearing my throat. Meanwhile, Lenore Smith was crunching away. "I was worried about eating these fried chicken feet right after that deep-fried noodle kugel, but this bracing, vinegary salad underneath really cuts through the fat and the richness," she said, swallowing. "I love the chicken feet, but I almost love this salad more. Is that crazy?" "Yes," Luke said. "The chicken feet are delicious. Cooked so that they're tender and also crunchy on the outside, and that sauce is the perfect amount of spicy and vinegary.
Amanda Elliot (Sadie on a Plate)
Brandon died two years ago yesterday,” I said. “I visited his grave. I gave blood. And then I came home and decided to finally go through his stuff.” Jason’s eyes took on a look of understanding. “That must have been very difficult for you.” “It was. It is. But it’s time.
Abby Jimenez (The Happy Ever After Playlist (The Friend Zone, #2))
Down in the steward’s room the butler offered his arm gravely to the Duchess of Hull’s maid, and conducted her to the place at his right hand. Lord Roehampton’s valet did the same by Mrs Wickenden the housekeeper. Mrs Wickenden, of course, was not married, and her title was bestowed only by courtesy. The order of precedence was very rigidly observed, for the visiting maids and valets enjoyed the same hierarchy as their mistresses and masters; where ranks coincided, the date of creation had to be taken into account, and for this purpose a copy of Debrett was always kept in the housekeeper’s room—last year’s Debrett, appropriated by Mrs Wickenden as soon as the new issue had been placed in her Grace’s boudoir. The maids and valets enjoyed not only the same precedence as their employers, but also their names. Thus, although the Duchess of Hull’s maid had stayed many times at Chevron, and was indeed quite a crony of Mrs Wickenden’s, invited to private sessions in the housekeeper’s room, where the two elderly gossips sat stirring their cups of tea, she was never known as anything but Miss Hull, and none of her colleagues in the steward’s room would ever have owned to a knowledge of what her true name might be.
Vita Sackville-West (The Edwardians (Vintage Classics))
You know, I used to love driving around with classical music on, looking for projects in areas where I felt comfortable, where I knew my way around and felt familiar with the streets. I can’t tell you how many times I cruised past the homes of my past victims over the years. I’d slow down and stare at the house and felt this feeling of accomplishment settle over me because that house was my trophy. It reminded me of what I’d gotten away with, of a secret I knew and nobody else did.” “Did you ever visit the graves of any of your victims?” I asked. “No, but I cut their obituaries out of the newspaper and read them over and over again. But I never went to the cemeteries, though. I’d read that the cops sometimes staked out those places, so it didn’t seem to be a safe place to go.
John E. Douglas (Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer)
Amazing. Rader still believed that he and the police shared some sort of professional camaraderie. I’d suspected that BTK was a wannabe cop back when I first looked at the case in 1979, but until sitting here and listening to him speak, I hadn’t realized how entrenched his delusion was. If only we’d been able to better capitalize on this frailty of his, to use it against him. Part of me wanted to reach through the TV monitor and beat some sense into his brain. Talk about paradoxes. Rader was too savvy to visit one of his victim’s graves or attend a community meeting, yet he somehow believed that Landwehr or LaMunyon would actually sit down to have a cup of coffee with him and chew the fat.
John E. Douglas (Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer)
All flesh is as the grass. Life spans can range from a day to a hundred thousand years. Yet all these living things will die, and it doesn’t bother them at all. They don’t need a future. We are different. We have a radar for eternity. Human beings have an instinct that life does not end with the grave. And we have a hunger this world cannot satisfy. Again, you don’t have to believe in the Bible to see this. Look at the pyramids. Visit a nursing home. God has placed eternity in the human heart. The Bible says the reason God has done that is that we were made for an eternal existence with him. And the most important thing we are doing in this life is preparing for the life that is going to come.
John Ortberg (Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You)
He was a newborn foal visiting the fresh grave of his mother when a black shadow suddenly blotted out the sun. Star raised his head and saw Thunderwing flying to Lightfeather’s grave with his captains in tow. Silvercloud, who was standing next to Star, inched closer as the stallions landed and folded their wings. Star noticed that even the daylight was tinged by the gold fire of the Hundred Year Star, and it was under this light that Star met the crimson-feathered over-stallion for the first time.
Jennifer Lynn Alvarez (Starfire (The Guardian Herd #1))
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier After visiting the grave of a brother at Arlington National Cemetery inD.C., the mourner had a little extra time and decided to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He was shocked to see a huge brass plate inscribed with the words: 'Here lies ᏰέƦẙḽԃṏሁ Լέῳ, Poet and Soldier' The man asked the Marine guard at the tomb, "I don't get it. How can this be the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with somebody's nameinscribed on it?" The guard said, "As a soldier, it's true, he was unknown, and that's why he's buried here. But as a writer he was the most popular and hated poet on Hello Poetry. I heard he was even more popular than Jesus. He performed a modern day miracle proving it to his doubters. Also, I've just got word he's trending at this cemetery right now.
Beryl Dov
Fred Adams, founder of Feraferia, was particularly influenced by Graves’s utopian novel Seven Days (Adler 239). Adams went so far as to meet Graves personally in 1959. Gerald Gardner also visited Graves at Majorca in January 1961 (M. Seymour 398). By this time however, Wicca’s popularity had spread and Gardner no longer monopolized its content.
Mark Carter (Stalking the Goddess)
I never know what people are thinking. It's like visiting a country where you don't speak the language and you're trying so hard to understand but no matter how many times you ask for juice, they keep bringing you milk.
Tracy Garvis Graves
On every trip back to the Midwest, I step aside from my schedule and visit my parent’s graves. And with trimmers in hand I kneel down and I cut back the intruding grasses and occasional weed that has edged up against their headstones. It is not in grief that I do this, but in the fondest recollection. The tears that often visit me there are those of joy; that God had thought enough of me to bless me with parent’s rich in love, ever bound by sacrifice, and sturdy in faith despite the nature of the adversities that so often beset them. And as I leave their graves and head back to the pressing demands of my world, I depart with the commitment to live my life in a manner that my children will find no grief at my grave, but joy in knowing that God chose me for them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The cartel wars in Juarez made it the most dangerous city in the world between 2008 and 2012, even worse than Baghdad. More than 10,000 people were slain during that period. When Monica and I visited, Juarez was experiencing another killing spree, with nearly a hundred murders in October alone. Throughout Mexico, the homicide rate had surged to 18 percent over the previous year. Everyone on both sides of the river was on edge. Downtown Juarez was desolate. Monica pointed out the pink crosses on the lampposts. Since the 1990s, hundreds of Juarez women, most of the teenagers, have been kidnapped, many of them in plain sight on the streets where we were standing. Some of their bodies have turned up in mass graves. Each of the crosses on the lampposts represents one of the missing women.
Lawrence Wright (God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State)
he realized that this visit, all his visits, were really trips to a cemetery, paying respects at the grave, the way they had visited his father’s, flowers in hand, his mother solemn, Leon bored and uncomfortable, not knowing, as he did now, that she wasn’t visiting his father but some younger part of herself, what she used to be.
Joseph Kanon (Istanbul Passage)
Nothing could stop tragedy from visiting your home. The angel of death would not pass over, leaving you unscathed, no matter how large your house was.
Charlaine Harris (Grave Surprise (Harper Connelly, #2))
Going back to Walter's house had been like visiting a cemetery where there were no tidy tombstones recording beginnings and endings but only question marks over the graves.
Mollie Panter-Downes (Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes)
Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling, for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted. Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now. I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories where the machines were made that would drive ever forward toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley; I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city. I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective. Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments of those who had died in pursuit of the objective and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective as if nobody ever had pursued it before. The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective. the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free to sell themselves to the highest bidder and to enter the best paying prisons in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies, which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects, which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress, to the completed sale, to the signature on the contract, which was to clear the way to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home would ever get there now, for every remembered place had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over. Every place had been displaced, every love unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant to make way for the passage of the crowd of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless with their many eyes opened toward the objective which they did not yet perceive in the far distance, having never known where they were going, having never known where they came from.
Wendell Berry (A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997)
Nancy realized that Sumi’s granddaughter was never going to visit the candy corn farmer’s grave, and it took everything she had not to weep for what had been irrevocably lost.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
Sometimes I think that the forests allow us to visit them by day. But at night, they belong to another world. A world where humans are not welcomed.
Ophelia Julien (Ghosts, Graves, and Groves)
He visited Robert Schumann's grave to lay a wreath and he became so indebted by the purchase of a piano that he could not afford the journey home to his mother and sister at Christmas. Observing that his money always ran out fast, 'probably because it was so round', he sent in his place a volume of eight of his musical compositions...
Sue Prideaux (I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche)
I love you, Jonathan." "I love you, too. I've been thinking about how I was going to tell you." "If you've been thinking about it, why didn't you just say it?" "Because the first time you say it to someone, you hope they'll say it back. And if you're not sure they will..." "Why wouldn't I say it back? I did say it. Just now." I thought I was the one confused by relationships and everything that went along with them. "Maybe there was a small part of me that worried you wouldn't. I don't always know what's going on up there," he said, tapping my temple gently. "I never know what people are thinking. It's like visiting a country where you don't speak the language and you're trying so hard to understand but no matter how many times you ask for juice, they keep bringing you milk. And I hate it.
Tracey Garvis Graves (The Girl He Used to Know)
For most people, death doesn’t exist, they lose friends, they lose a parent, they suffer from that, but their own demise remains distant. Nothing in the world can get them to visit their own grave. They close their eyes while the knife slowly pierces their heart.
Yannick Haenel (Hold Fast Your Crown)
i ask her how many years it would take to visit each / grave the past filled to bring me here. she tells me / that each day i am here is a flower left at a different stone.
Jess Rizkallah (the magic my body becomes: Poems)
I come out of the home for the aged, get on my bicycle, and think to myself that even if there is a communal grave it will in future not be of archaeological significance. Nevertheless, I have finally visited my deceased maternal grandmother who once bought me a spinning top.
Gao Xingjian (Soul Mountain)
Leafpool keeps telling me that I’m lucky I only lost half of it.” Twigpaw caught his eye. “What happened to the other half?” “Puddleshine said he was going to bury it.” “Bury it?” Surprise twitched through Twigpaw. Finpaw gave her a mischievous look. “Perhaps we should find its grave and sit vigil.” There was a purr in his mew. “We could mark it with a stone and visit every leaf-fall to pay our respects.
Erin Hunter (Darkest Night (Warriors: A Vision of Shadows, #4))
We’re waiting,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “For Father.” “Why does he not return?” The girl did not answer. Her gaze fluttered across the meadow to the ruins. “I thought I heard his voice,” she murmured. “Night had fallen. I was alone, here in my favorite tree.” Her eyes flashed to Ravyn. “I saw you, raven bird. You came as you always do, in your black cloak, your gray eyes clever, your face practiced. Only this time, you were not alone. A woman came with you. A strange woman, with eyes that flashed yellow gold, like mine. Like Father’s.” Ravyn’s insides twisted. “I watched you both leave, but the maiden returned.” Tilly held out a finger, pointing to the chamber’s window. “She went inside. That’s when I heard it—the songs my father used to hum as he wrote his book. But when I entered, he was not there. It was the woman who hummed as she raked her hands through the soil above Father’s grave.” “Elspeth,” Ravyn whispered, the name stealing something from him. “Her name is Elspeth.” Tilly didn’t seem to hear him. “Twice the maiden visited and dug at his headstone. She wandered through the meadow, the ruins.” Her lips drew into a tight line. “But when dawn came, her yellow eyes shifted to a charcoal color. So I came back here, to his grave. To watch. To wait.
Rachel Gillig (Two Twisted Crowns (The Shepherd King, #2))
I’ve had a lifelong reluctance to reenter places I’ve left, a resistance to anniversaries, family holidays, visits to graves or to offices I used to work in. My adult life has been one of discontinuities. To pass a house where I once lived is to feel a magnet pull upon my innards — I feel I could open the door, climb up the steps, take the key out of my pocket, walk into rooms just as they looked before moving day. Thus I avoid certain streets. If I visit my mother
Joyce Johnson (Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir)
i watched my dad die. i watched a man die. i held the hand of a dead body. i was alive next to a corpse. i laughed because i knew i would never be able to explain it. my dad doesn't have a grave except the one inside my lungs. i visit the cemetery anyway. i sit next to the oldest gravestone and open up a book to read. i say out loud, hello, and am always surprised when no one answers.
Ollie Schminkey (Dead Dad Jokes (Button Poetry))
The Land of Women, or Tír na Mna, is part of an Atlantic coastal myth that is shared from France up to Scotland and Ireland and was already ancient when the first Classical scholars wrote of it. An island of just women may seem fantastic but Pomponius Mela reported that the island of Sein, near the Ossimiens, is known as the oracle of a Gaulish God. The priestesses of that God number nine, and they are called “Senes” by the Gauls. Possessed by the God's spirit, they believe that they can create storms in the air and at sea by their spells; that they can shapeshift into any sort of animal, cure grave illnesses, and know and divine the future, but only to those sailors who voyage over the ocean to visit them.2
Caitlín Matthews (The Lost Book of the Grail: The Sevenfold Path of the Grail and the Restoration of the Faery Accord)