Obituary Quotes
O. K., I'm a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed "The Mau Maus of East Harlem," and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: "He was promising...").
Lester Bangs
If the kind of controversy which so often springs up between modernism and traditionalism in religion were applied to more commonplace affairs of life we might see some strange results. ...It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home.. ...it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.
Arthur Eddington
From time to time, you will hear our opponents declare that the union is weak, that the union has no support, that the union has not grown fast enough. Our obituary has been written many times. How ironic it is that the same forces that argue so passionately that the union is not influential are the same forces that continue to fight us so hard.
Cesar Chavez
John Tate and I were asked by Nature magazine to write an obituary for Alexander Grothendieck. Now he is a hero of mine, the person that I met most deserving of the adjective "genius". I got to know him when he visited Harvard and John, Shurik (as he was known) and I ran a seminar on "s". His devotion to math, his disdain for formality and convention, his openness and what John and others call his naiveté struck a chord with me.
David Mumford
