Obituary Quotations

An obituary should be an exercise in contemporary history, not a funeral oration.

The seed for my novel 'Half Brother' was planted in my mind over twenty years ago, but didn't germinate until late 2007 when I came across the obituary for Washoe, an extraordinary chimpanzee who had learned over 250 words of American Sign Language.

All publicity is good, except an obituary notice.

There's no bad publicity except an obituary.

Peter Utley, the newspaper's obituary editor cheerfully checked with Primrose Palmer, his assistant, on the day's soul traffic. The late archbishop from New Zealand sounded promising, it was agreed, but then again it was lunch time, and who knew what had been happening in some now-ending life.

I would hate my obituary to say Judge Harold H. Greene broke up AT&T and that's all he ever did and then he rested.

I didn't want to be knocked over by a car and have my obituary talk only about Prime Suspect.

When the 'Guardian' is commissioning writers to write obituary pieces about you and your career... it doesn't get much nastier than that. And you've just got to go, 'It doesn't actually matter.'

Did you notice when they did his obituary in the New York Times they ran the wrong picture? I called them up. All his old students did.

As far as the Merrill Lynch note is concerned, it's like reading an obituary that someone had died without knowing that they were still alive. Merrill cut its stock exposure to 45 percent, but why was it at 50 percent to begin with? That should raise some concerns.

Anyone who has to write an obituary for me one day will probably say, 'She did absolute depths of agony really well.' I'm not, however, an unhappy person.

You never really write the obituary on smog days,

It sounds like it's too soon to write the obituary on the housing market. There's not enough clear evidence.

The minute I read it, I was involved. I knew I would never be able to look myself in the mirror if one day I read the Daily News obituary page and Gail was on it.

In my book, 'The Big Three in Economics,' I found that the press has frequently and prematurely written the obituary of Adam Smith and his free-market philosophy, only to see a new and more vibrant global marketplace reemerge after being savagely attacked by Keynesians, Marxists, and assorted socialists.

It's not the loss of life that makes the death bitter -- it's the obituaries.

Metaphysics keeps surviving its obituaries.

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.