Peter Ross > Quotes

“Burial grounds are like libraries of the dead, indexes to lives long gone,”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

“The word ‘mummies’ conjures an image of a corpse wrapped in bandages, but that is not what these look like. They are more like bog bodies, stained and tanned and tough, except that they are so very dry. They bring to mind wood shavings, wasp nests, dead leaves, dust. They are skin stretched over bone stretched over time. More parchment than person. Autumn made flesh.”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

“No side of any war has a monopoly on tears.”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

“What, I wonder, does Monty James remember, in his modest grave in Eton Town Cemetery? The things he loved, perhaps. The smell of pipe smoke and candlewax in long winter evenings; a ghost story told after dark.”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

“I would like there to be one cemetery, just one, carved with [Wilfred Owen's] cynical dismissal of glory and sacrifice, but I wouldn't like my great-uncle, Captain Alexander Ramage, a doctor killed by German shelling in Normandy in 1944, to lie in it. That's the contradiction when considering war graves. Candour is for other people; consolation is what one wants for oneself.”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

“Graveyards, as Sheldon K. Goodman said, are libraries of sorts; their stories bound in stone. Council libraries may be closing, or shrinking, but graveyards – those which remain active – are forever replenishing their stock of spines.”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

“The angels are survivors. They looked on as the glass was smashed, the walls whitewashed, the statues decapitated, the roods torn down, Destruction was nothing new to them, of course; they were born of it. Acorn to oak to angel, these were trees once. They had roots and branches, drank from the earth, knew the thistledown touch of the sky. Birds landed and nested in them, the wings of crows foreshadowing their own coming form. In time, they felt the kiss of the axe, the teeth of the saw, and they began to take shape, to become angelic.”
― Peter Ross, Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church

“Seeds sown long ago still yield their blighted harvest.”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

“If you visit, take time to notice the three stone skulls on the gate. Dickens once felt compelled to venture out at midnight in order to admire these by the flash of a lightning storm.”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

“Jim Tipton, founder of the Find A Grave website, calls cemeteries ‘parks for introverts’,”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

“Exposure to a particle of darkness means one does not sicken with it.”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

“I had grown tired of the present with its anger and fear and lies. I was losing faith in the future. I wanted to delve into our deep past, to be buttressed and braced by history. A close examination of churches and the customs associated with them offered, it seemed, a chance to reconnect with who we were, rediscover who we are, and reconsider who we might yet be. The world, I thought, would look better through stained-glass eyes.”
― Peter Ross, Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church

“This is how it goes. You come to mourn and, later, to be mourned. The stones spread slowly across the earth, a coral reef of remembrance.”
― Peter Ross, A Tomb With a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards