Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.

Jessica Mitford

Categorized in : Order Memories Beautiful

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

Jessica Mitford

heartless change world

Objectivity? I've always had an objective.

Jessica Mitford

objectivity objectives

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative's funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment - in disastrously unequal battle.

Jessica Mitford

funeral victory hands

Picking other people's brains is an art worth cultivating.

Jessica Mitford

brain people art

Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing.

Jessica Mitford

passing important enemy

One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one's life has assumed some sort of shape. Not just a routine, like studying or a job or being a housewife, but something more complete than all those, which would include goals set by oneself and a circle of life-time type friends. I think this is one of the hardest things to achieve, in fact often just trying doesn't achieve it but rather it seems to develop almost by accident.

Jessica Mitford

circles jobs thinking

[On the United States:] A nation which does not appreciate that the simple elocution exercise 'Merry Mary married hairy Harry' contains not one but three vowel sounds.

Jessica Mitford

appreciate simple exercise

Growing up in the English countryside seemed an interminable process. Freezing winter gave way to frosty spring, which in turn merged into chilly summer-but nothing ever, ever happened.

Jessica Mitford

growing-up summer spring

Society created the prison in its own image; will history, with its penchant for paradox, reverse those roles?

Jessica Mitford

paradox roles prison

the whole point of muck-raking, apart from all the jokes, is to try to do something about what you've been writing about. You may not be able to change the world but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

Jessica Mitford

writing may trying

the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

Jessica Mitford

injustice unjust expression

A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.

Jessica Mitford

reading book years

Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't 'stand for election', they 'run for office.'

Jessica Mitford

running america people

Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.

Jessica Mitford

industry funeral

I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.

Jessica Mitford

fighting men war

I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.

Jessica Mitford

sister-in-law my-sister want

The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance in understanding prisons than the character and mentality of the kept.

Jessica Mitford

understanding may character

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

Jessica Mitford

macabre gracious dying

Things on the whole are faster in America; people don't stand for election, they run for office. If a person says he's sick, it doesn't mean regurgitating, it means ill. Mad means angry, not insane. Don't ask for the left-luggage; it's called a checkroom.

Jessica Mitford

running mean america

lifelong enemies are, I think, as hard to make and as important to one's well-being as lifelong friends.

Jessica Mitford

important enemy thinking