Famous Tombstone Inscriptions

Gravestone epigraphs of famous people

I am Providence 

Howard Phillips Lovecraft
(Swan Point Cemetery; Providence, Rhode Island)

ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ (greek)

Jim Morrison
(Pere Lachaise Cemetery;Paris, France)
{in translation: True to his own spirit.}


Quoth the Raven,
"Nevermore."
Edgar Allan Poe
(Westminster Presbyterian Cemetery; Baltimore, Maryland)

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
Oscar Wilde
(Pere Lachais; Paris, France)


Against you I will fling myself,
unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
Virginia Woolf
(Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex, England)


Cast a cold eye
On life, on death
Horseman, pass by!
William Butler Yeats
(Drumcliffe Cemetery; County Sligo, Ireland)


Steel True, Blade Straight
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(Windlesham Estate; Crowborough, Sussex, England)
[In 1955 the bodies of Conan Doyle and his wife, were moved to a grave at Minstead Churchyard, Hampshire.]

Called Back
Emily Dickinson
(West Cemetery; Amherst, Massachusetts)
{self written}


I had A Lover's Quarrel With The World
Robert Lee Frost
(Old Bennington Cemetery, Bennington, Vermont)


Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.
Sylvia Plath Hughes
(Heptonstall Churchyard;Heponstall; Yorkshire, United Kingdom)


I am Providence
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
(Swan Point Cemetery; Providence, Rhode Island)


Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life

without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless...
Brandon Lee
(Lake View Cemetery, Seattle, Washington)