Memorial Service Quotes

Liar. You've loved me since I held your hand at your mother's memorial service when you were five years old.
- Kristen Ashley

Memorial Service: Farewell party for someone who already left.
- Robert Byrne

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness."
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
- Jonathan Franzen

Chris Hedges said that Michael Jackson's memorial service was a variety show with a coffin, that MJ transformed himself through surgery and perhaps female hormones from a brown-skinned African American male to a chalk-faced androgynous ghoul with no clear sexual identity.
- Chris Hedges

Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set.
- Harold Macmillan

There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother's face. I wasn't expecting it. We hadn't requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-coffin. We got it anyway. They'd shampooed and waved her hair and made up her face. They'd done a great job, but I felt taken, as if we'd asked for the basic carwash and they'd gone ahead and detailed her. Hey, I wanted to say, we didn't order this. But of course I said nothing. Death makes us helplessly polite.
- Mary Roach

There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the house, writes the author in all seriousness describing a memorial service for a medical school's cadavers.
- Mary Roach

Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew (at Bruce Chatwin's memorial service) behind him. "I suppose we'll be here for you next week, Salman," he said.
- Salman Rushdie