Ritual disposal of the dead speaks clearly of an awareness of death, and thus an awareness of self.

The graveyard is about fifty by a hundred yards inside a wire fence. There are almost no trees in it: a lemon verbena and a small magnolia; it is all red clay and very few weeds.

Nature is honest, we aren't; we embalm our dead.

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

It makes small difference to the dead, if they are buried in the tokens of luxury. All this is an empty glorification left for those who live.

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

They were together now in the vault under the tombstone; their ashes were, with the remains of those of their children who were not buried elsewhere, although all their names were incised on the stone.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

Heap not on this mound Roses that she loved so well; Why bewilder her with roses, That she cannot see or smell?

There would be a black, six-foot-deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan's grave.