Best 451 quotes in «mourning quotes» category

She did not know how to grieve in the context of her life.

She'd worn that color, or gray in its place, for three years now. And unrelenting black for a year before that. It had been a bit of a badge, she realized, a uniform of sorts. One never had to worry about who one was when one's clothing proclaimed it so loudly.

She might do what the mortals did, and strain to convince herself that the death of her Boy and the loss of her husband had happened for some reason, that some restitution would be made for her, that she would be paid for her suffering with a truer and more tolerable understanding of the world, but she didn't think she had the muscles for it.

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

She was doing just what it looked like she was doing, lying about, half-awake and half-asleep, passing the time and waiting for something to change. Because it seemed very clear to her, in those first few days, that what she felt was so intolerable that it couldn't possibly last, and if she did nothing to distract herself from it, she'd use it up, and then she'd be able to get up, and move about, and care once again about her duties to her people, about her constitutional obligations to dancing and singing and feasting and praising the movements of the stars. She didn't consider at all--she didn't dare to consider--that the sources of grief inside her might be inexhaustible.

She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself.

She wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.

She wondered sometimes if it wasn't all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn't really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself.

Someone dies, there oughta be something. It oughta shake the world! You're not supposed to walk away!

Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it.

Some things happen for a reason, Others just come with the season.

Sometimes roused by desires (say, the trip to Tunisia), but they're desires of before--somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore, another country, the country of before.--Today it is a flat, dreary country--virtually without water--and paltry.

Sometimes we are written down in books. Or, someone tells a story in which our name figures. And so we live on, through someone else’s voice… These are the indelible marks others make of us, like the watermarks of high tides, names carved into barks, or stamps branded onto belongings. For what else is history but the collected voices of others, who sing a chorus of what once was. It is not words but voices that are the inscriptions seared onto pages, into minds, of the fragments others glean, as we live our lives in passing. Flitting and fl eeting, we rub off as we move through, and in our wake is cast the dust of the stars that we become. And sometimes it is caught on the fingers of others, and they press that gold to their lips, where it glistens, an eternal testimony to the fact that they adored us: So we, those of us who remember, we grow more golden as we age, as if cast into statues that commemorate the splendor of those who loved us, and those we were privileged to love.

Stop the pity party! Your sorrow is full and complete when you go through unfortunate circumstances and decide to mourn for life as a result of the unexpected.

Tha didn't mek it, did tha, luv, Our gowden weddin' day. Wi tried so hard to keep thi, But tha quietly slipped away. It's fifty years ago to-day Sin' ah become thi bride, Ah'd give everythin' in t'world, mi luv, To have thi by mi side. But there, it seems 'twere noan fer t'be But ah seems to hear thi say, "Durn't fret, mi lass, just carry on, We'll meet agen some day.

Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him.

Suffering; impossibility of being comfortable anywhere; oppression, irritations and remorse one after the next, everything under the sign "wretchedness of man," used by Pascal.

[Sylvia Plath] was now far along a peculiarly solitary road on which not many would risk following her. So it was important for her to know that her messages were coming back clear and strong. Yet not even her determinedly bright self-reliance could disguise the loneliness that came from her almost palpably, like a heat haze. She asked for neither sympathy nor help but, like bereaved widow at a wake, she simply wanted company in her mourning.

Tell all my mourners To mourn in red- Cause there ain't no sense In my bein' dead.

That’s just life. You can fight it or you accept it. The only difference is, if you accept it, you get to do other things. If you fight it, you’re stuck in the same spot forever.

That small world, like the great one out of doors, had the capacity of easily forgetting its dead; and when the cook had said she was a quiet-tempered lady, and the housekeeper had said it was the common lot, and the butler had said who'd have thought it, and the housemaid had said she couldn't hardly believe it, and the footman had said it seemed exactly like a dream, they had quite worn the subject out, and began to think their mourning was wearing rusty too.

The dawn broke, but the Sun did not rise that morning. It was a morning of ‘mourning’. (Page 24)

The afterlife is mostly a dream state where you confront the good and evil within you. The text repeatedly explains that the images the deceased sees and the sounds one hears are hallucinations created by one's own thoughts.

...The day was meant for what ineffable creature we must have missed?

That was the first time I experienced the desperate orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourning: it was the one place where people mingled and touched bodies and shared emotions without restraint or guilt. There was a wild, sexually flavored frenzy in the air. Later, when I saw a slogan by Khomeini saying that the Islamic Republic survives through its mourning ceremonies, I could testify to its truth.

That you are happy, that Monsieur Pontmercy has Cosette, that youth espouses mourning, that there are about you, my children, lilacs and nightingales, that your life is a beautiful lawn in the sunshine, that all the enchantments of heaven fill your souls, and now, that I who am good for nothing, that I die; surely all this is well.

The crumbling under the ‘cold corpse’ The deadness of ‘mortal separation’ The moaning wails of ‘mourning’ The push to ‘perform rituals’ The spectacle of ‘sorrow’ The goriness of ‘grief’ And The ‘mercilessness’ of the ‘merciful’ Who knows … ‘what’ and ‘why’ Who would ever want to know (Page 34)

The difference, she decided, was that now there was something to be done. Hell would be raised, and Oberon would come or not, but at least there would be no more idle tears. The night would end in joy or ruin, and somehow that was easier to abide than an endless, static grief.

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

The eyes, cleansed by weeping, have obtained a clearer vision of life’s profound mystery and beneficent discipline.

The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time. From "The Mower

The light in that room was a glow; I seem to remember the color green, or perhaps flowers. A pale green sheet covered his inert body but not his head, which lay (eyes closed, mouth set in a tense and terrible grimace) unmoving. Gianluca. Barely able to see, barely able to stand - my knees kept buckling – and breathing so quietly I thought that I, too, might die; that out of shock, I would just drift away, the shell of my body cracking open. No longer anchored by my brother’s love, I would be reabsorbed by sky. Gianluca. If there was never another sound in the world, I would understand – yes, that would be appropriate, it would be fitting. This was the antithesis of music, the antithesis of noise. My brother’s death seemed to demand silence of all the world. Gianluca.

The graveyard is the everlasting home of every man.

The hands of the clock buried inside her soul ground to a halt then. Time outside, of course, flows on as always, but she isn't affected by it. For her, what we consider normal time is essentially meaningless.

...The heart mourns people and places and returns to them in dreams...

The living mourn the dead for a time but they forget about them as days pass. The living are so selfish, so spoilt, so taken with the very act of living that they don't remember long.

The measurement of mourning: eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother.

The mourning of a loved one never ends with a funeral. It comes back every so often, like a stage performer eager for a curtain call and expects you to be loud about it. ...I gave it all the lung capacity I had.

The more death, the more birth. People are entering, others are exiting. The cry of a baby, the mourning of others. When others cry, the other are laughing and making merry. The world is mingled with sadness, joy, happiness, anger, wealth, poverty, etc.

The mourning process can feel like going through a carwash without a car.

The president is not at all like the powerful icon I imagined her to be. She’s more like I remember Amma: small and delicate with a sari that dances behind her as she walks. Of course, the president is clad in white, the color that shows eternal mourning of a lost child, while Amma never wore white. She wore reds and oranges and deep greens. Colors of celebration, of happiness. Perhaps she wears white now. Now that I am dead to her.

The reason he could do none of the necessary things to take care of himself, on the few occasions when he thought of them, was that he was preoccupied elsewhere.

There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything else has ended and nothing else can ever begin.

There are people who die and, with all due respect, you don't lose anything. But he was one of those that when they're gone you feel it. As if the whole world had become, from one day to the next, a little heavier.

There is no shame in mourning someone you loved," Lara whispered, "even if the world wouldn't understand.

There is a period for hope and one for mourning.

There is no panacea for this kind of loss. Just know that every day it gets the tiniest bit better-- suddenly one day you can put it in a different perspective.

There is an intense desire to do the proper thing. This feels like their induction. Suddenly, here is life, cut right to its center. Here it is, dismantled to its bones.

There is no right or wrong way to experience grief. Everyone is different. There can be interruptions and delays, depending on how we cope. In addition, we may bounce between denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, there's no rhyme or reason for the order or the length of time.

The size and height of the tree determines how heavily the ground will shake when it falls. The cassava tree falls and not even the pests in the forest are aware. The baobab tree falls and the whole forest looks empty! Such is human life!