Type ‘funeral + quotations’ into Google and you’ll get somewhere in the region of 20 million hits. Hardly surprising. Aphorisms, witty and otherwise, abound where funerals are concerned. Both texts in this comparative commentary to go are concerned with death and its ritual. The first text – text 1 – is the memorable opening from Iain Banks’ magnum opus, The Crow Road. The novel begins, ‘it was the day...