Jessica Mitford Quotations

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 conceded that the victory has been won hands down by the funeral establishment . . .

Walking through the streets of New Haven (Conn.) with William Sloane Coffin Jr. is like being in a movie about a small-town folk hero. People come up to shake his hand, students run after him with urgent questions, old folks stop their cars to call out, 'Good luck Bill!' and 'Howdy, Reverend.

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

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.

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

Objectivity? I've always had an objective.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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

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

Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening ...

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

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.

Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the Chicago Tribune in 1932, 'not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly.

Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.

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

In childbirth, as in other human endeavors, fashions start with the rich, are then adopted by the aspirant middle class with an assist from the ever-watchful media, and may or may not eventually filter down to the poor.

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

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

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

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.

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.

It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.

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.

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.

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

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.

Objectivity? I always have an objective.