Penny Colman > Quotes

“In life there is nothing more than life, in death nothing more than death: we are being born and dying at every moment.”
― Penny Colman, Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial

“his body was cremated and the leaders of the IWW divided the cremated remains into small envelopes that had Hill’s picture on one side and his “last will” on the other. The envelopes containing instructions to scatter the remains were sent to people in South America, Europe, Asia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and every state in the United States except Utah because Joe had said that he “didn’t want to be found dead” there.”
― Penny Colman, Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial

“The result was a spectacular cemetery with an Egyptian gate and fence that surrounded lakes, winding paths, and lush foliage. People were ecstatic, and throngs of famous and ordinary city dwellers went there to walk, meditate, and play. “Cemeteries are all the ‘rage’; people lounge in them and use them (as their tastes are inclined) for walking, making love, weeping, sentimentalizing, and everything in short,” an Englishman wrote after he toured Mount Auburn.”
― Penny Colman, Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial

“To protest segregated cemeteries in the United States, Thaddeus Stevens, a white politician who had devoted his career to abolishing slavery, decided to be buried in the “Negro” graveyard in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Part of the inscription on his grave reads: “Finding other Cemeteries limited as to Race…I have chosen that I might illustrate in my death the Principles which I advocated Through a long life.” Writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in a Negro cemetery, Garden of the Heavenly Rest, in Fort Pierce, Florida, until the writer Alice Walker found her grave and had a gravestone erected with the inscription: Zora Neale Hurston, “A Genius of the South,” Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist, 1901–1960.”
― Penny Colman, Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial

“Today in the United States, corpses that are unclaimed or unidentified or that no family member or friend can afford to bury are generally buried in mass graves. In Chicago, Illinois, they are buried in groups of about thirty-five in a memorial park. In New York City they are ferried to Hart Island for burial in a mass grave. These free burial sites are typically known as potter’s fields.”
― Penny Colman, Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial