Graveyard Quotes

“Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun.

When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey.

Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca was almost as powerful; he consumed 25,000 virgins a year.

Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quetzalcoatl is? Or Xiuhtecuhtli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitl? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them.

But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded
as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and
Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsullata, and Deva, and
Bellisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons.

The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests,
bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake.
Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels; villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence.

What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of:
Resheph
Anath
Ashtoreth
El
Nergal
Nebo
Ninib
Melek
Ahijah
Isis
Ptah
Anubis
Baal
Astarte
Hadad
Addu
Shalem
Dagon
Sharaab
Yau
Amon-Re
Osiris
Sebek
Molech?

All there were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following:
Bilé
Ler
Arianrhod
Morrigu
Govannon
Gunfled
Sokk-mimi
Nemetona
Dagda
Robigus
Pluto
Ops
Meditrina
Vesta

You may think I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: You will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity-gods of civilized peoples-worshiped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal.

And all are dead.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Our character isn’t defined by the battles we win or lose, but by the battles we dare to fight.”
― Robert Beatty, Serafina and the Black Cloak

“Within its gates I heard the sound
Of winds in cypress caverns caught
Of huddling tress that moaned, and sought
To whisper what their roots had found.
(“A Dream of Fear”)”
― George Sterling, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror

“One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“Blasted grave marker. There sure are a bloody lot of them. They've got some nerve burying all these dead people here.”
― Tess Oliver, Camille

“Life is the only thing which can never be replaced when lost.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle.

"It's a place for burying dead folk," I say.

Her eyes widen. "A place for doing what?"

"Don't people die in space?" I ask.

"Yeah," she says. "But we burn them. We don't put them in holes." She crosses her arms around herself, mouth and forehead frowning, peering around at the graves. "How can this be sanitary?”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

“It’s a laughable lock—one that you would use only to guard a graveyard.”
― Misba, The Oldest Dance

“There were dozens of stones of all sizes in the small meadow. Tall stones, bigger than either of the boys, and small ones, just the right size for sitting on. There were some broken stones. The Runt knew what sort of place this was, but it did not scare him. It was a loved place.”
― Neil Gaiman, M Is for Magic

“She glanced around at the tombstones. “You’re surrounded by death here. Way too depressing. You really might want to think about getting another job.”
“You see death and sadness in these sunken patches of dirt, I see lives lived fully and the good deeds of past generations influencing the future ones.”
― David Baldacci, The Collectors

“Mom? What do they do in the graveyard, Mom, under the ground? Just lay there?"
"Lie there."
"Lie there? Is that all they do? It doesn't sound like much fun."
"For goodness' sake, it's not made out to be fun."
"Why don't they jump up and run around once in a while if they get tired lying there? God's pretty silly--"
"Martin!"
"Well, you'd think He'd treat people better than to tell them to lie still for keeps. That's impossible. Nobody can do it! I tried once. Dog tries. I tell him, 'dead Dog!' He plays dead awhile, then gets sick and tired and wags his tail or opens one eye and looks at me, bored. Boy, I bet sometimes those graveyard people do the same, huh, Dog?"
Dog barked.
"Be still with that kind of talk!" said Mother.
Martin looked off into space.
"Bet that's exactly what they do," he said.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“I am nothing but a soul in grief - a gravestone yet not set but wit flowers in mind.”
― Laura Chouette

“I don't believe in these customs and rituals, as it's like manufacturing culture-fits on the graveyard of diversity. But then I haven't yet found any other alternative to this prevalent system, which doesn't have its fair share of drawbacks. So if following a custom means being courteous to someone, why not?”
― Anurag Shrivastava, The Web of Karma

“The master bedchamber at the top of a flight of badly worn and mossy stone steps, overlaid with grime, and the hard-dried excrement and remains of vermin—overlooking, from its single (barred) window, a marshy graveyard, the aged markers tilted and filthy from neglect, spiky grasses growing all around, and pools of brackish water interspersed among the graves.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“How they disappear as fragments of ice,
leaving a wisp of mist on the surface. The slow vastitude

of winter covering a graveyard. A silent field of wolves
watching moonrise. Praise the northern star. Its fullness,

not leading us astray.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“There’s something special about visiting a graveyard. Both life and death meet together in time.”
― Eric Overby

“The same pot that gave birth to the angels created the demons too. And eventually, there came a time where the differences between both races perished. What came out of the pot next shook the whole universe, and turned it into a graveyard of dreams.”
― Akshay Vasu, The Abandoned Paradise: Unraveling the beauty of untouched thoughts and dreams

“There is no shortage of dead people in graveyards that got there through blood clots.”
― Steven Magee

“Keep away from wrongdoing!
When goodness is good it is truly good.
For justice is for eternity:
It enters the graveyard with its doer.
When he is buried and earth enfolds him.
His name does not pass from the earth;
He is remembered because of goodness,
That is the rule of god’s command.”
― Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms

“The awful truth is that the graveyard is every person’s final destiny.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“I felt nothing standing there that I would not feel in any cemetery, quiet and curious and mortal.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Holidays with Bigfoot

“There's nothing left holy in the world for you. Herods!”
― Valentin Rasputin, Farewell to Matyora

“It was midnight and, framed by the cemetery gates, the figure stood tall and sinister. He was silhouetted by the weak light from a gibbous moon that made his muscular build and towering height seem much, much more than imposing. In one hand he held a heavy canvas sports bag. The other clutched a shovel that rested casually over one broad shoulder. If an errant driver or a late-night dog walker had glimpsed him, they would have thought he looked like a man with a strong sense of purpose.
But the roads were as silent as a held breath.”
― Ashley Lister, Blackstone Towers

“The noodle/worm idea was appealing to me. I hadn't made pasta in the competition yet. And noodle kugel was a traditional Jewish dish that held tight to my heart... and could also be made to look extremely disturbing. To be honest, it could be a little gross-looking on the best of days. Noodles submerged in a creamy cheese base, some of them sticking up top to get crispy in the oven. Raisins or other fruits flecking the kugel like little bugs. Maybe I could make the whole thing graveyard-themed.
If I was going to make something so rich and heavy and creamy, my other dish should balance it out by being light and savory. And spooky, of course. Maybe organ meats? Chicken feet were extremely scary-looking, maybe with some kind of beet sauce...”
― Amanda Elliot, Sadie on a Plate

“Those thoughts had returned even before I was properly back in the city. The pilot's voice crackling through the system - We are now making our final approach for landing - added to the anxiety of return because those ordinary and, by now, banal words seemed to carry some ghostly portent. My thoughts quickly became entangled with one another, so that, in addition to the usual morbid thought sone normally has on a plane, I was saddled with strange mental transpositions: that the plane was a coffin, that the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes. But as we broke through the last layer of clouds and the city in its true form suddenly appeared a thousand feet below us, the impression I had was not at all morbid. What I experienced was the unsettling feeling that I had had precisely this view of the city before, accompanied by the equal strong feeling that it had not been from the point of view of a plane.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“Death Demands A Recount by Stewart Stafford

The premature burial bell rings,
The body six feet below is alive,
Purgatory's choking siren fades,
Only darkness hears the bell peal.

Even if some listeners reacted,
A creeping terror stops them,
And dodging a vampire's bite,
Or the zombie’s flailing attack.

No, let the restless corpse lie,
Tighten the Reaper's icy grip,
Silence stills a memorial plot,
A blackout hush, no reprieve.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“A graveyard.
It's the largest cemetery I've ever seen--a place Jack would surely love.
A long rectangle of green lawn lined with rows and rows of old, moss-coated and weather-worn gravestones. Rain pounds the earth, and the cold tickle of air against my neck reminds me of the cemetery in Halloween Town. A feeling that exists in every cemetery, it seems. That hint of death. Of sorrow. Of lives brought to an end. But I don't have to go far before I find a small stone structure, an ornate mausoleum with spires along the roofline and a copper door, tarnished green from the rain. A tomb where the dead are placed to rest.
I glance up the path, the cemetery glistening in the wet air. I have passed through many realms, all the way into the human world to a city made strangely silent, and now this mausoleum is my way home.
My way back to Jack.”
― Shea Ernshaw, Long Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas

“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

“He was her rock,
now he’s dates on a stone
next to trees
on a plot in a spot
far from home”
― Eric Overby, Hourglass in Grace

“Though she’d never feared the graveyard before, it felt different having to walk on bones she knew, on flesh and skin she used to hug.”
― Apolline Lucy, The Silver Birds