I hate funerals, think they’re pompous and silly and disgusting. I hate the thought of having one myself even… — Fredric Brown
I hate funerals, think they’re pompous and silly and disgusting. I hate the thought of having one myself even though I won’t know about it while it’s happening. Since I’m a public figure I suppose there’ll have to be one, but I don’t want the only person I really love there sharing in it. If I die, I don’t want you to see me dead, even the outside of a coffin. I want your last memory of me to be as I am now, alive. I don’t want you even to think about a funeral or send flowers. Will you promise me those things, Max?
“Yes, if you’ll quit talking about them.”
p. 208Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
“But do you believe they really teleported?”
“I do. For instance, the guru with whom I spent time, under whom I studied this summer in Tibet, tells me he is certain that he has teleported twice. He is an honest man.”
“Let’s grant that. Tell me why you think he isn’t a mistaken one.”
p. 227
I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there ever again and I could never find comfort in her again. Ellen, beloved, you are dead and your voice is in my mind and only in my mind.
p. 233
I wish that I could believe not in mortality but in reincarnation or individual immortality; I wish that I could be living again in another body or, God help me, even watching from the edge of a fleecy cloud in Heaven or out through the dirty windowpane of a haunted house or through the dull eyes of a dung beetle or on any terms. On any terms I want to be watching, I want to be there, I want to be around, when we reach the stars, when we take over the universe and the universes, when we become the God in whom I do not believe as yet because I do not believe he exists as yet nor will exist until we become Him.
p. 242

