Zarzycki Obituaries Quotes

#1. He left for his day at the library. Today is research day. When he got there, he went directly to the microfiche machine and began looking through the newspaper obituaries for married men who died between 1980 and 1983. Their widows would be due for a little romance by now. He stayed there for hours, searching for her. His meticulous search netted seven names that merited further investigation. If some husband died and it made the first five pages of the paper, well, that meant a definite bonus because the dead man was powerful and with power came money. Their widows made excellent prospects for his future plans. #Quote by Jean Holloway

#2. When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying. #Quote by Don DeLillo

#3. Chronology of any event worked best in obituaries. It had no place in the world of sentiment, where memories, ideas and assumptions co-existed side by side. #Quote by Noorilhuda

#4. I've done a lot of death cartoons - tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries ... I'm not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes. #Quote by Roz Chast

#5. Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries. #Quote by Bill Cosby

#6. But why, why all the hurt? Because, said Mr. Halloway. You need fuel, gas, someting to run a carnival on, don't you? Women live off gossip, and what's gossip but a swap of headaches, sour spit, arthritic bones, ruptured and mended flesh, indiscretions, storms of madness, calms after the storms? If some people didn't have something juicy to chew on, their choppers would prolapse, their souls with them. Multiply their pleasure at funerals, their chuckling through breakfast obituaries, add all the cat-fight marriages where folks spend careers ripping skin off each other and patching it back upside around, add quack doctors slicing persons to read their guts like tea leaves, then sewing them tight with fingerprinted thread, square the whole dynamite factory by ten quadrillion, and you got the black candlepower of this one carnival.

All the meannesses we harbor, they borrow in redoubled spades. They're a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people's sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn't care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That's the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the scream from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way. #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#7. I don't listen to the news. I don't read the newspaper unless it's eccentric information - and the obituaries, of course. #Quote by Maira Kalman

#8. I feel like my career has been a series of glowing obituaries. #Quote by Michael Ian Black

#9. A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.' #Quote by Billy Collins

#10. Some people do not even want to look at a person when the person is alive, but when the person dies they write eloquent obituaries and make offerings of flowers. At that point the person has died and cannot really enjoy the fragrance of the flowers anymore. If we really understood and remembered that life was impermanent, we would do everything we could to make the other person happy right here and right now. #Quote by Thich Nhat Hanh

#11. I watched the coral reefs that I studied as a student vanish in the blink of an eye, and for decades I wrote and spoke of ocean obituaries. But big scary problems without solutions lead to apathy, not action. #Quote by Nancy Knowlton

#12. I think all the obituaries for newspapers we're hearing are premature. Many papers are belatedly but successfully adapting to the new news environment. I #Quote by Arianna Huffington

#13. My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies. #Quote by Bill Paxton

#14. Good priests never look for awards and, perversely enough in the clerical culture universe, do not receive many. Like the aged nuns who taught selflessly and nearly anonymously all their lives, these servants of the People of God only get into the papers when their obituaries are printed. #Quote by Eugene Kennedy

#15. Producing obituaries is a way of creating a legacy to remember important people of our times and their contributions. No matter whose obituary it is, I look for something inspirational about each person. #Quote by Laurie Nadel

#16. The Echo was a rag specializing in yard sales, area sports, and town politics. The residents scanned those things, he supposed, but mostly bought the paper for the obituaries and Police Beat. Everybody liked to know which of their neighbors had died or been jailed. #Quote by Stephen King

#17. Here's what I know: I eat mass quantities of red meat, curse religiously, sing out of tune but with conviction. I cry when it suits me, laugh when it's inopportune, read The New York Times obituaries and wedding announcements, out loud and in that order. #Quote by Julie Buxbaum

#18. A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men. #Quote by Georges F. Doriot

#19. I read obituaries first thing in the morning. With a cup of coffee. This is NOT MORBID. Just epic. Maybe it's a way of trying to figure out, before the day begins, what is important. And I am curious about all the little things that make up life. Little? #Quote by Maira Kalman

#20. Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise. #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#21. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives. #Quote by Charles Wheelan

#22. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#23. In general, writers never find out how strong their talent is: that investigation begins with their obituaries. In the USSR, writers found out how good they were when they were still alive. If the talent was strong, only luck or silence could save them. #Quote by Martin Amis

#24. I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once. #Quote by Sarah Manguso

#25. IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away - in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse's friends - but people don't die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue. #Quote by Donald Hall

#26. Every morning I read the obituaries. If it ain't there I make myself a cup of tea and carry on like I have the past century or so. #Quote by Lois Greiman

#27. Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards. #Quote by Austin Kleon

#28. The most cursory examination of even the most progressive organs of information reveals a curious inability to recognize women as newsmakers, unless they are young or married to a head of state or naked or pregnant by some triumph of technology or perpetrators or victims of some hideous crime or any combiniation of the above. Women's issues are often disguised as people issues, unless they are relegated to the women's pages which amazingly still suvive. Senior figures are all male; even the few women who are deemed worthy of obituaries are shown in images from their youth, as if the last fourty years of their lives have been without achievement of any kind. If you analyse the by-lines in your morning paper, you will see that the senior editorial staff are all older men, supported by a rabble of junior females, the infinitely replacesable 'hackettes'. #Quote by Germaine Greer

#29. It's not the loss of life that makes the death bitter
it's the obituaries. #Quote by Evan Esar

#30. Oh definitely. It'll be in a hot tub, with my entire head squeezed into a jet. The photos are going to be hilarious. Man, I really hope the internet sticks around so people can reference this article in my obituaries and see that what sounds like a joke was actually amazingly prescient. #Quote by Jason Sudeikis

#31. I scrolled on down to the obituaries. I usually read the obituaries first as there is always the happy chance that one of them will make my day. #Quote by Robert A. Heinlein