Mourning Quotes

“Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.”
― Meghan O'Rourke

“Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief;”
― William Cullen Bryant

“If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.

They're right. It does.

However much you beg it to stop.

It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.

It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life...

All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.

Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.

Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.

And then the world turns...

And somebody falls off...

And oh God it's such a long way down.

Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller...

Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.

We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.

Trying to measure how far we have to fall.

No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives...

Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold.

"Time's a great healer."

"At least it was quick."

"The world keeps turning."

Oh Alec—

Alec's dead.”
― Alan Moore, Swamp Thing, Vol. 5: Earth to Earth

“I'd always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.
But I was wrong.
Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost - it was the combination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.
- Florence Day”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Mourning was its own kind of music—the sound of so many hearts, of so many breaths, of so many standing together.”
― Victoria Schwab, Our Dark Duet

“Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is memory that makes it our ruin.”
― Brian Ruckley, Fall of Thanes

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.”
― John Scalzi, Old Man's War

“Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“It was too perfect to last,' so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic - as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it ('None of that here!'). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean 'This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.' As if God said, 'Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?”
― Roland Barthes

“Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“It was the meanest moment of eternity.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Farewell is said by the living, in life, every day. It is said with love and friendship, with the affirmation that the memories are lasting if the flesh is not.”
― R.A. Salvatore, The Legacy

“The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives.”
― Rob Liano

“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.”
― Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977–September 15, 1979

“Death is only meaningless if it does not change us, Vis.”
― James Islington, The Will of the Many

“Music, When Soft Voices Die

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever—that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connection? And why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. My mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains whom the spoiler has not seized.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.”
― Benjamin J. Carey, Barefoot in November

“...he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world, so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope....”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“I felt as though the vessel if my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“We all live with our losses. We don't want to, but we can”
― Carrie Jones, Captivate

“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.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin

“The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.”
― Stephen King

“I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“Good Madonna, why mournest thou?
Good Fool, for my brother's death.
I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.
I know his soul is in heaven, Fool.
The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night