[Skip to Content]
National Memorial Planning - Homepage

Famous Headstone Epitaphs

Headstones are used to mark graves. Since time immemorial, people have used their gravestones to say their last words to the world they leave behind in the form of inscriptions. These gravestone inscriptions are called epitaphs. Epitaphs may be self-written when the deceased pens words they’d like their graves to bear and their friends and family to remember them by before their death. Similarly, they may also be written by the deceased’s close family or friends.

History has been a testament to many interesting and spirited epitaphs. Artists and writers have famously left behind clever epitaphs to help with their remembrance. We present a handful of these below –

  • “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die” – Thomas Campbell, Spanish poet and educator.
  • "Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment." – Dorothy Parker, famous American poet and wit. Parker was known for her sense of humor and eye for satire.
  • “I knew if I waited around long enough something like this would happen.” – George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright and political activist.
  • “Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be Defense enough against Mortality" – Aphra Behn, Famous English poet, playwright and novelist of the late 17th century
  • “I Had A Lover’s Quarrel With The World.” – Robert Frost, famous American poet and ruralist.
  • “Here, at last, he is happy.” – Edgar Allan Poe, American writer reknowned for his tales dealing with the macabre.
  • "Against you, I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding o Death! The waves broke on the shore." – Virginia Woolf, Celebrated 20th century English novelist, pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness narration in English literature.
  • "Best of all, he loved the fall--the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams, and above the hills the high blue windless skies…now he will be a part of them forever.” – Ernest Hemingway, Nobel-prize winning American journalist and short-story writer.
  • “No one thinks of winter when the grass is green” – Rudyard Kipling, Famous English poet and playwright from the Victorian Era.

 

Thanks for reading,

Karen