Death Culture Quotes

I think the minute you mention death, people run for the hills - unless it's heavy metal. People do not like death.

I've always liked monster movies and I've always been fascinated by - again, growing up in a culture where death was looked upon as a dark subject and living so close to Mexico where you see the Day of the Dead with the skeletons and it's all humor and music and dancing and a celebration of life in a way. That always felt more of a positive approach to things. I think I always responded to that more than this dark, unspoken cloud in the environment I grew up in.

A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.

In earlier cultures with pagan belief systems, light and dark were celebrated equally, people were around death a lot. In contemporary Western culture, we don't have that, and horror is a place you can be immersed in it.

Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.

… we are told that we need these workers to support an aging society, yet, over the past three decades we have allowed over 40 million Americans to die in abortion clinics. Why have we turned our hearts on our own innocent babies and embraced the culture of death? We no longer even talk about the tragedy of abortion or its consequences on our mothers, our culture, or our land. Instead, of course, we are replacing- we are seeking to replace the missing with an imported servant class.

I don’t think that a society that sanctifies death can prevail.

In China, the dead are not forgotten - my relatives cheerfully pointed out all the niches of deceased friends and family, as if gesturing at the homes of the living.

As I got older, I got more Victorian and morbid. I got into things that circled around death, like skulls or morgue photographs or handwritten diaries. They can be almost haunted with all this history, and you project onto it and then it gets onto you.

Death is the least civilized rite of passage.

The way we deny death says something about how we live our lives, doesn't it? At least in Sweden or Scandinavia, you don't have to search further back in time than maybe three generations to find another way to relate to death. People then had a different, closer relationship with death; at least it was like that in the countryside.

You don't die in the United States, you underachieve.

The fashion magazines are suggesting that women wear clothes that are 'age appropriate.' For me that would be a shroud.

THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Even what they eat and drink, these palefaces who don't know what wine istheir uglinesstheir pink sausage skin, horrible, they only live because there is penicillin,... the world as an Americanized vacuumtheir fake health, their fake youthfulnessthe way they use cosmetics even on corpses, their whole pornographic attitude to death.

Most of the debate over the cultures of death and life is about process. The debate focuses on the technology available to determine how we prolong life and how and when we end it.

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

in the place I am from ... a grave is topped off with a huge mound of loose earth - carelessly, as if piled up in child's play, not serious at all - because death is just another way of being, and the dead will not stay put, and sometimes the actions of the dead are more significant, more profound, than their actions in life, and no structure of concrete or stone can contain them.

I don't want a lot of strangers looking down at my wrinkles and my big fat belly when I'm dead.

In Moscow they do not pay much attention to the living but keep their cemeteries in a splendid state.

If humans died in a healthy culture, they would not lock out the earth in metal coffins and carve their names on stone monuments, but would instead place the naked body in the earth and plant a tree above the silent heart.

My grandma, Nai Nai, has had the clothes she wants to be buried prepared since she was like 60. I guess there is an openness to discussing. It's part of life. It's part of the every day.

Mexicans don't think of ghosts as haunting you.

In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.

We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.

On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.