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“When people die they are sometimes put into coffins, which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots.

But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the creamatorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or snow somewhere.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle.

"It's a place for burying dead folk," I say.

Her eyes widen. "A place for doing what?"

"Don't people die in space?" I ask.

"Yeah," she says. "But we burn them. We don't put them in holes." She crosses her arms around herself, mouth and forehead frowning, peering around at the graves. "How can this be sanitary?”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

“Death frees us from even ourselves.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Most people are not really scared of death. They are merely terrified of being taken to a mortuary and/or being buried or cremated and/or being forgotten.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Among other things, culture is the decision as to how a corpse is to be returned to the soil.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Everyone is no-one-to-be.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“¡­Ten minutes later I pulled the van into the loading dock behind the hospital and removed my gurney. It was a bit of a farce to use a full-sized adult gurney for a few babies, but I didn¡¯t think walking through the corridors with my arms filled with them was a particularly good plan either. I had an image of fumbling and dropping them, like a stressed out mom carrying too many grocery bags to avoid the extra trip in from the car.”
― Caitlin Doughty , Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

“The shorter one¡¯s life, the longer the list of loved ones one will not have had to bury.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“To be knav'd out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations escaped in burning burials.”
― Thomas Browne

“Of wartime London:

It looked as if London was being cremated, one piece at a time.”
― Alan Hlad, The Long Flight Home

“Cremation is the refusal to put a corpse to good use.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“During a funeral, the corpse receives way more affection, love, or attention, from some people, than was ever received, from those people, by the person the corpse used to be.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“My next drone folk album will be called "The Cremation Reforms of Octavius B. Frothingham".”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“We are all our own bodies¡¯ visitors.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If anyone at my funeral says 'it's what he would have wanted', I'll kick the lid off my coffin and throttle them. Or, if I've been cremated, I'll flip the lid off the urn and become a dust storm in their eyes. Only you know what you truly want. Anything else is presumption skewed through personal agendas.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Some, finding many fragments of skulls in these urns, suspected a mixture of bones; in none we searched was there cause of such conjecture, though sometimes they declined not that practice.--The ashes of Domitian were mingled with those of Julia; of Achilles with those of Patroclus. All urns contained not single ashes; without confused burnings they affectionately compounded their bones; passionately endeavouring to continue their living unions. And when distance of death denied such conjunctions, unsatisfied affections conceived some satisfaction to be neighbours in the grave, to lie urn by urn, and touch but in their manes. And many were so curious to continue their living relations, that they contrived large and family urns, wherein the ashes of their nearest friends and kindred might successively be received, at least some parcels thereof, while their collateral memorials lay in minor vessels about them.”
― Thomas Browne, Urne Burial

“What the sun compoundeth, fire analyzeth, not transmuteth. That devouring agent leaves almost always a morsel for the earth, whereof all things are but a colony; and which, if time permits, the mother element will have in their primitive mass again.”
― Thomas Browne, Urne Burial

“They burnt not children before their teeth appeared, as apprehending their bodies too tender a morsel for fire, and that their gristly bones would scarce leave separable relicks after the pyral combustion. That they kindled not fire in their houses for some days after was a strict memorial of the late afflicting fire. And mourning without hope, they had an happy fraud against excessive lamentation, by a common opinion that deep sorrows disturb their ghosts.”
― Thomas Browne, Urne Burial

“I¡¯ve always wanted to be free, but was stuck in the Forbidden City for life. After I die, I don¡¯t want to be held back anymore. I want to be like the wind. Isn¡¯t that more lovely? Being buried in the ground, what¡¯s so great?¡­ -Ruo Xi”
― Tong Hua, Bu Bu Jing Xin/²½²½¾ªÐÄ

“You can use a rope to get somebody out of a pit toilet. Or to make it necessary for somebody to put your body into a grave.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“That you are about to bury or have just buried your loved one does not make you and your loved ones immortal for a while.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“???? ????? ?????? ??... ????? ?????????," ????? ????????? ????????, ?? ??? ????? ?? ?”
― Saroj Aryal

“Because what is an offering, really? what can human beings actually give to God? What can they give to each other even?. . . .Laura Chance had placed ten percent of all she'd earned in this same blue box before offering it -- in the full faith that it would be accepted -- to her Lord. So now, just as faithfully, she'd placed a hundred percent of her husband in the same box. That was her answer to the questions. And I'm hard put to think of another that would do greater honor to her husband, her Lord or her little blue box.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“The sole appropriate burial is to be scorched back into the cosmos.”
― Erica Alex, Cake in the Blackbird Stew

“The trees are full of life, both living and deceased.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Have you ever wondered where cremation fits into the carbon cycle?”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Does DNA feel the pain of cremation?”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Have you ever wondered what happens to the parts that go up in smoke during a cremation?
The answer is in the trees.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Almost every funeral is attended by at least a few people whose funerals the person being buried thought he or she would attend.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“You know what I found the other day? The deed to the family burial plots in Waldheim. There are two graves left. You wouldn't want to buy mine, would you? I'm not going to lie around. I'm having myself cremated. I need action. I'd rather go into the atmosphere. Look for me in the weather reports.”
― Saul Bellow