Ancestor Quote by Maxine Hong Kingston

Where I grew up, in a remote village at the back of a valley, the old still thought the dead needed attending to -…

— W. G. Sebald

It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.

— Robert Green Ingersoll

“There are those, too, who are ethnically predisposed in favor of funerals, who recognize among the black drapes and dirges an emotionally potent and…

— Thomas Lynch

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

— Joan Didion

The true way to mourn the dead is to take care of the living who belong to them.

— Edmund Burke

The dead don't bear a grudge nor seek a blessing. The dead don't rest uneasy. Only the living.

— Margaret Laurence

Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own…

— Anthony Kennedy

Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.

— Xenophon

It's so easy to fetishise the dead. We rose-tint or villainise them, and so often in the retelling they are saints or sinners, rather…

— Sophie Dahl

The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind.

— Washington Irving

We hold reunions, not for the dead, for there is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the dead.…

— James A. Garfield

“Here it is necessary briefly to consider the question of the cult of ancestors before venturing farther. The spirits of the departed are believed…

— Lewis Spence