"Gravedigger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in May), 1674. The reference is applicable to either of these two. No sooner has Trincalo chosen Sycorax, Caliban's sister, as his spouse, than the treacherous Stephano wins the she-monster for himself, and a battle royal ensues. Cave Underbill, a famous Gravedigger in Hamlet, excelled as Trincalo. p. 299. Fop-corner. One of the corners of the pit nearest the stage much affected by the gallants and beau critics. There are frequent allusions in prologues, epilogues and plays, cf. the ballad epilogue ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... funeral-dirge was played for him, save the blast blown through the naked branches of the trees, as they hurried the plain pine coffin to its final resting-place. At the gate of the cemetery the few friends turned back and left the lifeless clay to the old gravedigger, who never guessed the honor ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... dips stuck and flickering on the beams, the gale howling above, the ship tossing about like mad on her side; there we all were, Jermyn, the captain, everyone, hardly able to keep our feet, engaged on that gravedigger's work, and trying to toss shovelfuls of wet sand up to windward. At every tumble of the ship you could see vaguely in the dim light men falling down with a great flourish of shovels. One of the ship's boys (we had two), impressed by the weirdness of the scene, wept as if his heart would break. ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... his later years, especially as he was subject to the medical treatment of a worse than empirical era. At one time he says, while he was at Westminster, his spirits were so buoyant that he fancied he should never die, till a skull thrown out before him by a gravedigger as he was passing through St. Margaret's churchyard in the night recalled him to a sense ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... Villers-Cotterets, twice a battlefield, as the Germans advanced and then retreated, first pursuing and then pursued by the French and British, 3000 German dead had been left upon the way, and 1000 of our Allied troops. Dig as hard as he could my friendly gravedigger had been unable to cover up all those brothers-in-arms who lay out in the ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... church I made my way, under the dispiriting drip, drip of the rain, and accompanied by a feeble old man, who is sexton, clerk, gravedigger, and anything or everything of an ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... In order to save burial-expenses, the woman fooled the grave-digger. When he had buried one man and returned for his money, she had another body lying where the first had lain, and told him that he could not have his money until the man was buried to stay. Thus the poor gravedigger buried all six corpses under the impression that he was working with the same one over and over again. On his way back from burying the sixth, he met the husband riding home on horseback. Thinking him to be the corpse, which he exactly resembled, the grave-digger cried out, ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... Malone said pleasantly, wishing he'd signed with his full occupation and address. "I'm a gravedigger. Business has been very ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of cases one is implored to come to the Pier Concert Hall at Flushington-on-Sea, or the like, because, "owing to your appreciative remarks about my performance as the Second Gravedigger in Hamlet, I am sure you would like to see my King Lear." These give a good deal of trouble, because it is difficult to decline without hurting feelings. Another branch lies in the simple request from people with whom one ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... part," said a merry-looking fellow, who had been a gravedigger in bad times, and had now opened a stall of wares for the living, "I could forgive him all, but bathing in the holy ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... thoughtless of me, after inquiring about the doctors, to ask about the gravedigger. I was told that when there was no member of a "special tribe" available it was the duty of neighbours to dig graves. A community's displeasure was marked by neighbours refraining from helping to dig an unpopular person's ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... to go to the play. We were both very well pleased with H. Payne in certain parts; in some instances I even thought him excellent, especially in the natural, gentlemanly, and pensive tones in which he went through the gravedigger's and other scenes of the last act. But, for the soliloquies, and the grand conference with the mother! oh, there, Garrick rose up to my remembrance with an clat of perfection that mocks all approach of ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... Reid, was the sexton, and it did not do to express these views too loudly, lest perchance Mr. Boosey should, just in his play, construct a coffin or two just too big for the regulation grave, and thereby leave Mr. Reid in the lurch. For the undertaker and the gravedigger are as necessary to each other, as Mr. Reid maintained, as a pair ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... studying the law." Such was his life till the first attack of madness came at the age of thirty-two. He had already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an ominous shock as a schoolboy at Westminster, when a skull thrown up by a gravedigger at St. Margaret's rolled towards him and struck him on the leg. Again, in his chambers in the Middle Temple, he suffered for a time from religious melancholy, which he did his best to combat with the aid of the poems of George Herbert. Even at the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... visit. It was a grey, dropping day; the grass was strung with rain-drops; and the people in the houses kept hanging out their shirts and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A gravedigger, and a friend of his, a gardener from the country, accompanied me into one after another of the cells and little courtyards in which it gratified the wealthy of old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He was silent when they drove to the church, silent when the priest sprinkled holy water on him, silent when they took him to his grave and his father helped the gravedigger to lower him, and when they threw clods of earth upon him and left him ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... burial ground; grave yard, church yard; God's acre; tope, cromlech, barrow, tumulus, cairn; ossuary; bone house, charnel house, dead house; morgue; lich gate^; burning ghat^; crematorium, crematory; dokhma^, mastaba^, potter's field, stupa^, Tower of Silence. sexton, gravedigger. monument, cenotaph, shrine; grave stone, head stone, tomb stone; memento mori [Lat.]; hatchment^, stone; obelisk, pyramid. exhumation, disinterment; necropsy, autopsy, post mortem examination [Lat.]; zoothapsis^. V. inter, bury; lay in the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the cathedral—whom you must not confound with a gravedigger, as you might an ordinary sexton; cathedral sextons are personages of more importance—was seated about this hour at supper in his home, close to the cathedral. Suddenly the deep-toned college bell boomed out, and the man ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... after a short pause, which no doubt seemed longer both to him and to me than it would have seemed to any third person, "I don't see anything amiss with the coffin. I don't say it'll last till doomsday, as the gravedigger says to Hamlet, because I don't know so much about doomsday as some people pretend to; but you see, sir, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... to comfort him; and in order to make the delusion subservient to the removal of its terrors, he offered to restore the coin, or even the whole of what he had received, that the simple gravedigger might be certain he ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... a long-legged stutterer whom they called Ariston in jest, was the most funereal fellow on the planet; he suffered from acute necromania; anything connected with coffins, corpses, wakes and candles roused his enthusiasm. He would like to have been a gravedigger, the priest of a religious confraternity, a cemetery warden; but his great dream,—what most enchanted him,—was a funeral; he would imagine, as a wonderful ideal, the conversations that the proprietor of a funeral establishment must have with the father ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... before, the gravedigger, while digging up the whitened bones of the ancient dead, had broken up with his pick-axe a mouldering coffin, and a head rolled to his feet It was of later date, for the lower jaw was still fastened to it and it had not the calcareous colour ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... I sign the register in my quality of head gravedigger, you can go and get your money at once. Besides, you will ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... soldier's funeral, which I have never seen before. He was shot in the head yesterday, and makes the four hundred and eleventh British soldier buried in this cemetery. I happened to be there looking at the graves, and the French gravedigger told me there was to be another buried this afternoon. The gravedigger's wife and children are with the Allemands, he told me, the other side of La Bassee, and he has no news of them or ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... the gravedigger that some one spent great part of that night in the graveyard, and we believe it to have been Jamie. He walked up the glen to the school-house next forenoon, and I went out to meet him when I saw him coming ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... of wall was pulled down, and three acres of land by its side purchased; but all the new portion is almost tenantless; the tombs, as heretofore, continue to crowd together towards the gate. The keeper, who is at once gravedigger and church beadle (thus making a double profit out of the parish corpses), has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows smaller, and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... under accumulated wrongs, these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into a rigor of reality far denser than the material realities of brass or granite. Who builds the most durable dwellings? asks the laborer in "Hamlet;" and the answer is, The gravedigger. He builds for corruption; and yet his tenements are incorruptible: "the houses which he makes last to doomsday." [13] Who is it that seeks for concealment? Let him hide himself [14] in the unsearchable chambers of light,—of light which at noonday, more effectually than any ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... villain, and leaned to him brotherly. Even the anecdotes he most prizes have a fine look this way—a hunger for completion in achievement, even in the violation of fine humane feeling or morality, and all the time a sense of submission to God's will. "Doctor," said the dying gravedigger in Old Mortality, "I hae laid three hunner an' fower score in that kirkyaird, an' had it been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I wad hae likeit weel to hae made oot the fower hunner." That took Stevenson. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... answers I got were two; one of them, Geggie Trotter, a natural simpleton, told Tommy Staytape, "that, for part-payment, he would give me a prime leg of mutton, as he had killed his sow last week."—And what, said I to Benjie, did Jacob Truff the gravedigger tell ye by way of news? "He just bad me tell ye, faither, that hoo could ye expect he cou'd gie ye onything till the times grew better; as he hadna buried a living soul in the kirkyard for mair ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... goddess Bhawani, and other sects the goddess Devi—and they committed a countless number of murders all over the country. Thugs were a bold, resolute set of men, and as a rule divided themselves into groups consisting of a leader, a persuader, a strangler, a scout, and a gravedigger, but all the gangs, happily for India, were finally broken up under Colonel Sleeman about 1860. Some of the men were hanged, and many transported to our penal settlements in the Straits of Malacca. Dacoity was in some parts of India akin to ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... brushwood, are the remains of the most important of the Tyrian burying-places, consisting of half-filled-up pits, isolated caves, and dark galleries, where whole families lie together in their last sleep. In some spots the chalky mass has been literally honeycombed by the quarrying gravedigger, and regular lines of chambers follow one another in the direction of the strata, after the fashion of the rock-cut tombs of Upper Egypt. They present a bare and dismal appearance both within and without. The entrances ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... was a learned man. 'He had turned over the leaves of Justinian's Institutes, and knew that they were written in Latin. He was well acquainted with the title-page of Blackstone's Commentaries, and argal (as the gravedigger in Hamlet says) he was not a person to be laughed at.' He attended the Parliament House in the character of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the celebrated speakers. He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative or the Forensic. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dissector, cutting his subject open, carving its flesh with the scalpel of his mandibles; he is literally a gravedigger, a sexton. While the others—Silphae, Dermestes, Horn-beetles—gorge themselves with the exploited flesh, without, of course, forgetting the interests of the family, he, a frugal eater, hardly touches his booty on his own account. He buries it entire, on the spot, in a ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... neither in the state of mind nor the attitude to enjoy a joke; but there was a language in the back of Barney's head, an expression of patient endurance, that would have drawn smiles from a gravedigger; and Sanchez and ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... shoulder-blade. Lieutenant Cane, an "orficer boy," who only joined on Black Monday, was also wounded in the back. The dhoolies quickly came and bore the wounded away to the Wesleyan Chapel. Mr. Dalzell was buried in the afternoon. "Well, well," sighed the old gravedigger, "I never thought I should live to bury ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... Parson Weems. He says: "The first place of education to which George was ever sent was a little old field school kept by one of his father's tenants, named Hobby, an honest, poor old man, who acted in the double capacity of sexton and schoolmaster. Of his skill as a gravedigger tradition is silent; but for a teacher of youth his qualifications were certainly of the humbler sort, making what is generally called an A, B, C schoolmaster. While at school under Mr. Hobby he used to divide his playmates into parties and armies. One of them was called ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... was this day how he sat in the carridge that time with the little child's coffin on his knees. He wouldn't let the gravedigger so much ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann |
