Best 451 quotes in «mourning quotes» category

On days like this, birthdays, the anniversary of the wave, I want to be alone. Alone, I am close to them, I slip back into our life, or they slip into mine, undisturbed.

--One day it happens: what you have feared all your life, the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.

One I love is taken from me, we will never walk together over the fields of earth, never hear the birds in the morning. Oh, how I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone away. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all my days.

Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live. Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence. The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know—all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.

Only Certain offered no enticements, for she knew nothing could ease the pain. Not books or photography or food. Not even love.

Only those who escape Yesterday understand the language of Now.

On these forgotten islands they rest, and the sand packs tight around them while their friends have gone on to other islands, to die on other beaches. The little invasions, the crumbs of global warfare, eventually to be remembered only by mapmakers and mothers.

Only I know what my road has been for the last year and a half: the economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular mourning that has kept me unceasingly separate by its demands; a separation that I have ultimately always projected to bring to a close by a book--Stubbornness, secrecy.

Ordinary days deliver joy easily again & I can’t take it. If I could tell you how her eyes laughed or describe the rage of her suffering, I must admit that lately my memories are sometimes like a color warping in my blue mind. Metal abandoned in rain. My mother will not move. Which is to say that sometimes the true color of her casket jumps from my head like something burnt down in the genesis of a struck flame. Which is to say that I miss the mind I had when I had my mother. I own what is yet. Which means I am already holding my own absence in faith. I still carry a faded slip of paper where she once wrote a word with a pencil & crossed it out. From tree to tree, around her grave I have walked, & turned back if only to remind myself that there are some kinds of peace, which will not be moved. How awful to have such wonder. The final way wonder itself opened beneath my mother’s face at the last moment. As if she was a small girl kneeling in a puddle & looking at her face for the first time, her fingers gripping the loud, wet rim of the universe.

Outdoors next day, I was dizzy from a sense Of being ejected with some violence From vigil in a white and distant spot Where I was numb, into this garden plot Too warm, too close, and not enough like pain.

O zła Persefono, Mogłażeś tak wielu łzam dać upłynać płono?

Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable.

Part of us did die. Literally - that tissue on your face, the part they removed. It died. And you can't recover from any kind of death without mourning it.

Pak Karman hugged his wife’s gravestone tightly. “You left without saying farewell!” The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.

People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.

People tell you to keep your "courage" up. But the time for courage is when she was sick, when I took care of her and saw her suffering, her sadness, and when I had to conceal my tears. Constantly one had to make a decision, put on a mask and that was courage. --Now, courage means the will to live and there's all too much of that.

Perhaps Hurston saw in her mother, Lucy, a version of Persephone, who is so missed when she's gone that the world literally starts to die. This type of grief, as Toni Morrison writes in Sula, has no top and no bottom, "just circles and circles of sorrow.

Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world.

Raw anguish slithers through my brittle bones as the deathly call rots the air. Who murdered you old friend? The forest has no words to identify the hand, only erratic echo.

Recalling this now, I can tell only the husk of the story--a story known inwardly only by those who have experienced such a loss, which we'd wish for no one else to suffer. Those who have not often say, "I can't imagine how you felt, what that was like." I can hardly imagine it either, even having lived through it. Recently, when someone said that, I found myself answering, "Like being burned alive.

Roz is crying again. What she's mourning is her own good will. She tried so hard, she tried so hard to be kind and nurturing, to do the best thing. But Tony and the twins were right: no matter what you do, somebody always gets boiled.

Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so did their guests, and some of them wept, but Saeed had wept only once, when he first saw his mother's corpse and screamed, and Saeed's father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend.

Seeing his daughter slowly die, coupled with his infinite sadness and misery, the clockmaker becomes a recluse to the tower of the castle and begins to build something behind closed doors, not even his daughter knows what he’s up to. For five years, she only sees him briefly at meal-times before locking himself up in the tower once again..." "...Did he have a bathroom in the tower?" "Yes, Jack. A big one! En-suite! Power-shower and spa! Where was I!?

Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random.... If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.

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.

Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting.

Patroclus, he says, Patroclus. Patroclus. Over and over until it is sound only.

RED Here’s the red The red of love The fire that burns Within my soul The reddest red I’ve ever known The flame untouched Ignited coal Here’s the red The red of pain That stinging pain No one must know The deepest red I’ve ever felt The emptiness The mourning soul Here’s the red The red I knew That exalted fire That once ignited you The reddest red I ever knew… The deepest red I ever knew…

Regardless of what you've been through we all process energy differently.

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 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 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 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 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!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Sabía ya que sólo las viejas palabras servían: muerte, congoja, tristeza, pesar, sufrimiento. Nada moderadamente evasivo o medicinal. La aflicción es un estado humano, no médico, y aunque haya píldoras que nos ayuden a olvidarla - y todo lo demás -, no hay pastillas que la curen. Los afligidos no están deprimidos, sino solo debidamente, adecuada, matemáticamente tristes.

[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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.