"Cremation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... capricious to the last, died at Sompting in 1881, within a year of ninety. His body was removed to Gotha for cremation, and his ashes lie beside ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... the great advantages of cremation—apart from all sanitary conditions—lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the physical elements composing the dense and ethereal corpses, brought about by the burning. Instead of slow and gradual decomposition, swift dissociation takes place, ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... where cremation is going on at all hours of the day, is the first place the stranger visits. The bodies are brought in and placed upon a square pile of wood, raised to a height of four feet, in the open yard. Under ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... 2d. By CREMATION, generally on the surface of the earth, occasionally beneath, the resulting bones or ashes being placed in pits, in the ground, in boxes placed on scaffolds or trees, in ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... charge of the old home here. She was an excellent medium who had often proved herself worthy of my mother's entire confidence. Acting under the guidance of my arisen mother, she at once, without hesitation, took charge of all business arrangements, especially those of preparing for the cremation of my mother's body, in accordance with her often expressed wish. She telegraphed the sad news to my father in Alaska, asking for instructions. He replied at once that the body must be cremated, as my mother had directed in her will. He would return as soon ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... JOHN, friend of Shelley and Byron; entered the navy as a boy, but deserted and took to adventure; met with Shelley at Pisa; saw to the cremation of his body when he was drowned, and went with Byron to Greece; was a brave, but a restless mortal; wrote "Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that charge a week after. A headless body, supposed to be that of the Bhao, was found some twenty or thirty miles off. The body, with that of the Peshwa's son, received the usual honours of Hindu cremation at the prayer of the Nawab Shujaa. Several pretenders to the name of this Oriental Sebastian afterwards appeared from time to time; the last was in captivity in 1782, when Warren Hastings procured ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... rather for curiosity than use; for it is of small importance to know which nation buried their dead in the ground, which threw them into the sea, or which gave them to birds and beasts; when the practice of cremation began, or when it was disused; whether the bones of different persons were mingled in the same urn; what oblations were thrown into the pyre; or how the ashes of the body were distinguished from those of other substances. Of the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... the discharges, cremation of plague victims, destruction of rats, and preventive inoculation of healthy persons with sterilized cultures of ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Occasionally the chamber, and even the passage, is built of masonry and roofed with stone slabs or a corbel vault, and the simple door-slab gives place to a stone door, hinged, or sliding in a grooved frame. Cremation was occasionally practised in the Hellenistic Age, but the regular custom was to bury the body; during the Bronze Age in a sitting or a contracted posture, in all later periods lying at full length. Stone coffins (sarcophagi), ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... call this the "Ashes" tope. I also would have preferred to call it so; but the Chinese character is {.}, not {.}. Remusat has "la tour des charbons." It was over the place of Buddha's cremation. ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... stone, and where the Campo Santo has for centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, with its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic wash of poisoned waters that ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... of naturally sober aspect and reflective disposition. He had always been opposed to cremation, and here was a funeral pile blazing before his eyes. He, too, had his human sympathies, but in the distance his imagination pictured the final ceremony, and how he himself should figure in a spectacle where the usual centre piece of attraction would be wanting,—perhaps ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the custom of most of the higher-caste Hindus to cremate their dead; while many of the lowest castes and outcasts resort to burial. Cremation would doubtless be the more sanitary method, if the fire were not so inadequate in many instances. The Hindu burning-ground is a place of ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... upon the just as well as the unjust, and often no human foresight can prevent it. Louisa Alcott supposed that she was nearly well of her fever when inflammatory rheumatism set in. The worst of this was the loss of sleep which it occasioned. Long continued wakefulness is a kind of nervous cremation, and resembles in its physical effect the perpetual drop of water on the head with which the Spanish inquisitors used to torment their heretics. Any mental agitation makes the case very much worse, and it requires great ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... the celebrated dog of nursery lore, who appertained to the ancient and far-famed Mother Hubbard. All the doctors gave him up, all the secularists prepared mourning garments, the printers were meditating black borders for the 'Idol-Breaker,' the relative merits of burial and cremation were already in discussion, when the dog we beg pardon the leader of atheism, came to ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... not surprising that the Emperors of this literary dynasty were mostly temperate in expressing their religious emotions. T'ai-Tsu, the founder, forbade cremation and remonstrated with the Prince of T'ang, who was a fervent Buddhist. Yet he cannot have objected to religion in moderation, for the first printed edition of the Tripitaka was published in his reign (972) and with a preface of his own. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... indifferent trails, cliff-dwellings, hewn-out water cisterns, mescal pits, with countless pieces of broken pottery, arrowheads, stone axes, hammers, mortars, pestles and even cemeteries. or places of cremation. ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... conference on the subject is the next step needed. It will be attended by men and women who, no longer believing that they can live for ever, are seeking for some immortal work into which they can build the best of themselves before their refuse is thrown into that arch dust destructor, the cremation furnace. ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... and cremation in one and the same tribe; a circumstance which should guard us against exaggerating their value as characteristic ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... ritual, and a criticism of the bearing of the latter on the former.[34] He shows here that the ritual, so far from having induced the hymn, totally changes it. The hymn was written for a burial ceremony. The later ritual knows only cremation. The ritual, therefore, forces the hymn into its service, and makes it a cremation-hymn. This is a very good (though very extreme) example of the difference in age between the early hymns of the Rig Veda and the more modern ritual. Mueller, ib. IX. p. I (sic), has given ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... consciousness. Then the Kshatriya ladies saw those heroes,—their unreturning sons, brothers, and fathers,—lying dead on the field. Then the pacification by Krishna of the wrath of Gandhari distressed at the death of her sons and grandsons. Then the cremation of the bodies of the deceased Rajas with due rites by that monarch (Yudhishthira) of great wisdom and the foremost also of all virtuous men. Then upon the presentation of water of the manes of the deceased princes having commenced, the story of Kunti's acknowledgment of Karna as ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... time of our author, meant, the place of cremation. In the third book, sl. 1, 2, Yajnavalkya says:—A child under two years of age is to be buried, nor shall water be offered; every other deceased, being followed by his relatives to the place for disposal of the dead, ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... was blown right into the hut. In a moment the straw blazed up, cutting off all escape for Bill and Reddy. Fortunately the framing was not strong and the frost had loosened up the foundations, so that a few frantic kicks opened an exit in the rear of the hut just in time to save our comrades from cremation. Once it was fairly started we were powerless to put out the blaze until the hut was ruined. The snow that covered the walls checked the fire somewhat, but the thatching burned from the inside, melting the snow and dropping it suddenly into the flaming straw bedding on the floor. As we sat ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... has been given of the cremation of Henry Smith, at Paris, Texas, for the murder of the infant child of a man named Vance. It would appear that human ferocity was not sated when it vented itself upon a human being by burning his eyes out, by thrusting a red-hot iron down his throat, ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... air. The bodies of dead animals lay in the streets; the waters of the bay and gulf were thick with the dead. All the disinfectants in the city were quickly consumed. An earnest appeal for more was sent to Houston and other places. Tuesday a general cremation of the dead began. Trenches were dug and lined with wood. The corpses were tossed in, covered with more wood, saturated with oil, and set on fire. Later, bodies were collected and placed in piles of wreckage, and the whole then given to the flames. Men engaged in this horrible ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... cremation of the dead was found, either at Awatobi or Sikyatki, nor have I yet detected any reference to this custom among the modern Hopi Indians. They have, however, a strange concept of the purification of the breath-body, ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... treatment of the dead shows what a strong hold custom and faith can have over a people; believing that fire is a symbol of Deity, and also revering the earth, neither cremation nor burial of the dead is permitted. The Towers of Silence, five of them occupying the most beautiful site on Malabar Hill, and surrounded by spacious grounds with trees, shrubbery, and ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... In these eases of advanced pulmonary disease the sooner the better. The French custom of speedy interment may be defended as more wholesome than our own. On the other hand, I admit that it has its weak points. Cremation is, perhaps, the best and only method of removing the dead which is open to no objections except one. I mean, of course, the chance that the deceased may have met with his death by means of poison. But such cases are rare, and, in most instances, would be detected by the medical ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... coffin—was called irreverent, because he suggested that the dead should be buried in wicker-work baskets, with fern-leaves for shrouds, so that the poor clay might the more easily return to mother earth. Those who favor cremation suffer again a still more frantic disesteem; and yet every one deplores the present gloomy apparatus and dismal observances ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... forehead of each showed that self-destruction and cremation had seemed a better choice than the gallows and a grave ...
— The Lost House • Richard Harding Davis
... day, to stop the useless fight and save the remains of their business. But Foreman simply laughed. Said there wouldn't be any remains when he was ready to quit. Allowed that he believed in cremation, anyway, and that the only way to fix a brand on the mind of the people was to burn ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... Europeans the question of burial v. cremation may be instanced as a matter of social custom that has been made a religious question. But in no country more than in India have customs, mores, come also to mean morals. A halo of religious sanctity encircles the things that have been ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... for the Persians who embraced the religion of the Magi not having adopted the two contrivances of corporal dissolution prevalent among civilised nations—cremation or burning, and simple inhumation—by the superstitious reverence with which they regarded the four elements. Sir T. Browne remarks that similar superstitions may have had the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 42, Saturday, August 17, 1850 • Various
... resists the axe, having spent all his energy in building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am gone...." Each with its ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... desert of gravel or rock. The architectural features of Leh, except of the palace, are mean. A new mosque glaring with vulgar colour, a treasury and court of justice, the wazir's bungalow, a Moslem cemetery, and Buddhist cremation grounds, in which each family has its separate burning place, are all that is noteworthy. The narrow alleys, which would be abominably dirty if dirt were possible in a climate of such intense dryness, house a very mixed population, in which the Moslem element is always increasing, partly owing ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... Marvellous Glances Round the World MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE—Photography Perfected; The Canon King; Land Monopoly; The Grand Canals; The Survival of Barbarism; Concord Philosophy; The Andover War; The Catholic Rebellion; Stupidity of Colleges; Cremation; Col. Henry S. Olcott; Jesse Shepard; Prohibition Longevity; Increase of insanity; Extraordinary Fasting; Spiritual Papers Cranioscopy (Continued) Practical Utility of Anthropology in ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... Mallas of Kusinara thought: "It is much too late to burn the body of the Blessed One to-day. Let us now perform the cremation to-morrow." And in paying honor, reverence, respect, and homage to the remains of the Blessed One with dancing, and hymns, and music, and with garlands and perfumes; and in making canopies of their garments, and preparing decoration ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... carry it on her back for two miles. He is familiar with Indian customs and history, and a careful cross-examination convinced him that her information of old customs was not obtained by tradition. She was conversant with tribal habits she had seen practised, such as the cremation of the dead, which the mission fathers had compelled the Indians to relinquish. She had seen the Indians punished by the fathers with floggings for persisting in the practice ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... I not return by Friday night—you will, no doubt, be good enough to make search. Descend the river, keeping constantly to the left; consult the papyrus; and stop at the Descensus Aesopi. Seek diligently, and you will find. For the rest, you know my fancy for cremation: take me, if you will, to the crematorium of Pere-Lachaise. My whole fortune I decree ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... pleasant they were to look at. The day was the antithesis of its predecessor—the mildest we had had for a long, long time. It was a relief to find that the "hottest day of the year" was a figurative expression used to denote the middle of summer. Our fears of cremation were entirely dissipated—as sometimes happens in the case of passengers to the Cape who, sweltering in a broiling sun outside the tropics, marvel how they are ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Ghastly Vengeance The Vanderdecken of Tappan Zee The Galloping Hessian Storm Ship on the Hudson Why Spuyten Duyvil is so Named The Ramapo Salamander Chief Croton The Retreat from Mahopac Niagara The Deformed of Zoar Horseheads Kayuta and Waneta The Drop Star The Prophet of Palmyra A Villain's Cremation The Monster Mosquito The Green Picture The Nuns of Carthage The Skull in the Wall The Haunted Mill Old Indian Face The Division of the Saranacs An Event in Indian Park The Indian Plume Birth of the Water-Lily Rogers's Slide The Falls at Cohoes Francis Woolcott's Night-Riders Polly's Lover ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the other firm. Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the plague. Quicklime feverpits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes. Or bury at sea. Where ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Single Tax Green. Cremation Orange. Abolition of War Red. Vegetarianism Purple. Hypnotism Yellow. Dress Reform Black. Social Purity Blush Rose. Theosophy Silver. Religious Liberty Magenta. Emancipation of } Crushed ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... mad. Strikes were declared and settled within hours. Congress was called into session early. The President got authority to ration lumber and other materials suddenly in starvation-short supply. State laws were passed against cremation, under heavy lobby pressure. A new racket, called boxjacking, ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)
... you please. Cleopatra quaffed liquid pearl in honor of Antony, Nero shivered his precious crystal goblets, and Suger pounded up sapphires to color the windows of old St. Denis! Chacun a son gout! If I choose to indulge myself in a diamond cremation in honor of my tutelary goddess Brimo, who has the right to expostulate? True, such costly amusements have been rare since the days of the 'Cyranides' and the 'Seven Seals' of Hermes Trismegistus. See what a tawny, angry glare leaps from my royal jacinth! ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of burial in the parishes named have all been closed for many years. It would be impossible to reopen any of them without a special faculty, and I doubt whether such a faculty would be granted. Possibly cremation might meet the difficulty, but even that is doubtful; and, in any case, the matter would not be in the control of Godfrey Bellingham. Yet, if the required interment should prove impossible, he is to ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... that consume the body. On Malabar Hill itself, in the very heart of the favourite residential quarter whence the Europeans are being rapidly elbowed out by Indian merchant princes, the finest site of all still encloses the Towers of Silence on which, contrary to the Hindu usage of cremation, the Parsees, holding fire too sacred to be subjected to contact with mortal corruption, expose their dead to be devoured by vultures. Calcutta has no such conspicuous landmarks of the East to disturb the illusion produced by most of one's surroundings that this ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... single bone remains, the spirit of the dead person may still be attracted to it, and consequently remain earthbound; but when the corpse is cremated, and the ashes scattered abroad, then the spirit is set free. And, for this reason alone, I advocate cremation as the best method possible of dealing ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... convinces us of its truthfulness. The painter (born in 1843, and a pupil of Piloty) secured a wide renown through his painting of "The Living Torches of Nero." From a long list of notable pictures by Siemiradski, we select for mention "Phryne at Eleusis," "The Sword Dance," and "The Cremation of a Russian Chieftain ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... the painted Florentine box went to their cremation within the same hour that Miss Fanny spoke; and a little later Lucy called her father in, as he passed her door, and pointed to the blackened area on the underside of the mantelpiece, and to the burnt heap upon the coal, where some metallic shapes still retained ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... and the contents of the phials remaining in the casket. The blue flames leaped high as these last were added to the cremation, and the room became oppressive with their ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... lines of thought is clear and strong; but it does not necessarily presuppose an absolute distinction of race. It is not improbable that towards the end of the Mycenaean period, to which in any case the connection with the Homeric poems would belong, cremation was beginning to supersede the older practice of interment. In late Mycenaean graves at Salamis evidences of cremation are found, and at Mouliana, in Crete, there are instances of uncremated bones being found along with bronze swords on one side of a tomb, while on the other ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... numerical value of the gods—The arrangement of the temples, the local priesthood, festivals, revenues of the gods and gifts made to them—Sacrifices, the expiation of crimes—Death and the future of the soul—Tombs and the cremation of the dead; the royal sepulchres and funerary rites—Hades and its sovereigns: Nergal, Allat, the descent of Ishtar into the infernal regions, and the possibility of a resurrection The invocation of the dead—The ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... it is not uncommon to find that the body has been cremated before interment. In the Bowl and Bell types, about three out of every four bodies have been so disposed of. In Dorset the relative interments, by cremation or otherwise, is four out of five, while in Cornwall cremation is ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... total absence of human remains has frequently been remarked, and the theory is advanced that cremation must have been practiced. We have no evidence, however, of such a custom among the historic tribes of this region, and, besides, such elaborate tombs would hardly be constructed for the deposition of ashes. Yet, considering the depth of the graves, their remarkable construction, and the character ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... and contain the solemn and memorable scene of the cremation of Shelley's remains—one of the most vivid and impressive narratives I know. Then there are the chapters of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography which deal with Shelley, a little overwrought perhaps, but real biography for all that, and interesting ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to Saint-Domingo, naturally, by sailing vessel, to have it whitened. Homme a bonne fortune and petit-maitre were no longer in favor, elegant was the proper appellation. The Seine water was drunk freely, but it had already begun to be analyzed and doubted; cremation was advocated and vivisection denounced; the classic education and Latin were derided, just as by M. Jules Lemaitre; the evolution of the species was discussed, and the sorrowfulness of the Carnival lamented,—the ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... inventory of the State would watch its every man and the wide world write its history as the fabric of its destiny flowed on. At last, when the citizen died, would come the last entry of all, his age and the cause of his death and the date and place of his cremation, and his card would be taken out and passed on to the universal pedigree, to a place of greater quiet, to the ever-growing galleries of the records of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells |
