last words

So I've stumbled over the last words of a handful of Civil War people over the last few weeks and being as I cringe these days when all I have to contribute to most conversations are Civil War facts, stories and quotes. I figured this is why I made this blog in the first place right? To spare my beloved friends/colleagues.

The other day when I apologized for cutting a friend off to tell her something civil war related she laughed and said it was OK and that she didn't mind - "really!". She started laughing and told me that she had overheard me cut into someone's conversation about their thighs at a party we both had attended a few weeks ago. She said that I walked up to them and declared: "One of Lincoln's good friends from Illinois thought Lincoln's thighs were 'as perfect as a human being's could be'"! I guess this made my CW tidbits somehow bearable to her???

In any case, here is a very tiny list of last words I've compiled, The CW ones are uninterseting in some respects but I like them just the same:

“They won't think anything about it”
- Abraham Lincoln
(His wife Mary had sat very close to him in the theater box they shared with Major Henry Rathbone and Miss Clara Harris, she had put her hand in his and whispered, "What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?" He was reassuring his wife that it would be all right to hold hands just before John Wilkes Booth sneaked into the box and shot him from behind).

"Strike the tent."
- Robert E. Lee
(On his deathbed 5 years after the war had ended)

"Please don't let me fall"
-Mary Surratt
(The first woman executed by the United States federal government, was hanged on July 7, 1865 for conspiracy related to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln)

"Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."
- General Stonewall Jackson

Last night I got curious as to people's last words in general and here are some more I came across:

"mi mou tous kiklous taratte"
Translation: "Don't disturb my circles!"
- Archimedes
(In response to a Roman soldier who was forcing him to report to the roman general after the capture of Syracuse, while he was busy sitting on the ground proving geometry theories. The Soldier killed him in response.)

"The Earth is suffocating... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive."
- Frederic Chopin

"Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!"
- Karl Marx
(asked by his housekeeper what his last words were)

"I'm bored with it all."
- Winston Churchill
(before slipping into a coma and dying nine days later)

"To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?"
- George Eastman
(he took his own life)

"Turn up the lights— I don't want to go home in the dark."
- O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)

"I see black light."
- Victor Hugo

“Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies."
- Voltaire
(when asked by a priest to renounce Satan)

"I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis."
- Humphrey Bogart

Here are 2 epitaphs that scared me:

Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and nowhere to go.
- Unknown grave

"Quello che siete fummo, quello che siamo sarete"
Translation: "What you are we were and what we are you will become"
- Unknown adult's grave in Rome, Italy