Memorial Day Quotes
This page is assembled from three others: War, Death and Gratitude. There is no memorial collection underneath it. One poem is filed against the day itself, Joyce Kilmer’s, in Trees and Other Poems (1914), and it opens with a bugle that, he says, is not singing of war today.
The rest is whatever the three source pages rate highest, so it leans toward poetry and toward writers who saw war up close. Several famous lines about death and sacrifice carry flags here, so read the note on a quote’s own page before you attach a name to it.
Make us enemies of every people on earth, but prevent a civil war.
The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave,
The deep damp vault, the darkness and the worm.
The British Army should be a projectile to be fired by the British Navy.
Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.
But what most showed the vanity of life
Was to behold the nations all on fire.
Your bounty is beyond my speaking;
But though my mouth be dumb, my heart shall thank you.
For the helmsman is recognized in the tempest; in the warfare the soldier is proved.