gravestones QUOTES

1 " One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.

In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? "

― Margaret Atwood , The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)

2 " Some people won't have kids, but I’m not going to have parents. I’m burning their birth certificates and defacing their gravestones tonight. "

― Bauvard , Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic

3 " Only the Christian faith claims that its Leader died and rose again and is alive at this moment. Many gravestones carry the inscription, “Here lies . . . ,” but on Christ’s tomb are emblazoned the words, “He is not here. "

― Billy Graham , Billy Graham in Quotes

4 " ….two slate-colored gravestones settled at a slant into the lower corner of the field beside the lane. She could not read the names engraved on them, but she knew what they were. Joseph Watson, 1820-1891, and James Watson, son of Joseph and Hannah Watson, 1844-1863. The grave of Hannah Watson lay beside her husband’s and because she had died last, she had no marker, unless the pine tree growing there might count as one. To-morrow two men would drive up and leave a basket of flowers and a flag for Joseph because he had fought in the Civil War, and for James because he had died on his way home from it, but they would not have anything for Hannah because she had only identified her son James one hot summer day on the platform of North Derwich Station, and raised all the food her husband ate for twenty years as he sat in a chair in her kitchen, and done washings for Mrs. Hale to buy monuments for them at the end. But the flowers would die in the boxes; even if Jen found time to go down and set out the pansy plants in the ground, stray cows were sure to eat them off before the summer was over; and the Forrest children would take the flags to play with. Nothing would interfere with the tree. "

5 " I stopped in St. Bernadette's Cemetery one of my favorite places... The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid out an aisle similar to those in any library. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those whose names have been blotted from the pages of life; who have been forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here. "

― Dean Koontz , Fear Nothing (Moonlight Bay, #1)

6 " Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’

‘And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are. "

― David Foster Wallace , The Pale King

7 " I just run faster and hit the slowest of the lead boys. I wink and race by him. He smells like onions and he has big, wet circles in the pits of his shirt. He speeds up, but can only stay with me for a tenth of a mile before he drops back. Then it’s Nick.
I cruise next to him. He’s some sort of running god, because he isn’t close to being winded. His stride is long, powerful, and quick.
“Hi.”
Why I said this, I do not know. He’s cute. Okay. I am a sucker for cute boys and he was nice to Issie. Plus, he has good hair and he isn’t as pale as most Maine males. He looks like he works in the sun, or at least has seen the sun once, maybe many weeks ago. Plus, life is all supposed to be about making love, not war. My dad listened to John Lennon; I know this stuff.
“You’re fast,” he says, easy. No huffing. No puffing. No blowing the house down.
“So are you.”
We run together, keeping pace. The only one ahead of us is Ian, who is loping around the track as if it’s nothing.
Nick shrugs at me while he runs, which is really something, because when I’m running full tilt it’s hard for me to speak, let alone break form to shrug.
“You can go faster, can’t you?” I huff out.
He just gives a little smile again and then his eyes shift into something cold, like gravestones with just the barest information about a life etched onto them.
“Zara,” he whisper-says.
I lean in closer to hear him. “What?”
My voice is not a whisper. It matches the thudding beat of my heart, the bass of the music that blares out of the speakers.
“Awesome job, new girl!” Devyn yells, clapping. "

― Carrie Jones , Need (Need, #1)

8 " The last to fall were the buildings, distant and solemn, the gravestones for an entire world. "

― Dan Wells , Partials (Partials Sequence, #1)