In Mourning Quotes & Sayings

John Donne's 'A Valediction: forbidding mourning' concerns a sea voyage, and uses the image of a circle as an antidote to the abyss of loss and separation. He pictures the invisible but precious bonds which link carer and cared-for, lover and beloved in an attachment relationship as slender threads of gold. — Jeremy Holmes

They will try to ascribe a purpose to my death, as though it were a punishment, but don't you do so, in order that I continue to live in all the shadows of your longing. I will always be in your sleep and your wakefulness. I will be with you praying, propitiating and yearning for you, in sadness, in sorrow, in dismay and in the most profound happiness. — Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. — C.S. Lewis

The main thing is to WRITE. Some days it might be 2000 words. Some days you might tinker with two sentences until you get them just right. Both days belong in the writing life. Some days you may watch a 'Doctor Who' marathon or become immersed in a book that is so good you can't stop reading. Some days you may be in love or in mourning. Those days belong in the writing life, too. Live them without guilt. — L.K. Madigan

I
I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday
nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time
his death and her sorrow
I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together
I heard them together. — Joseph Conrad

And in the dark of that room, notorious for the woven patterns of desire it had seen, Ammar ibn Khairan held the woman beloved of the man he'd killed, and offered what small comfort he could. He granted her the courtesy and space of his silence, as she finally permitted herself to weep, mourning the depth of her loss, the appalling disappearance, in an instant, of love in a bitter world. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Tried to focus on a particular aspect of this historical moment: the failure of mourning. This is something I haven't seen a great deal of in the writing around this disaster. And my view is that you write about disaster by writing around it, by writing allusively. — Teju Cole

Black was not the universal hue of mourning in Europe. In Castile, white obtained on the death of its princes. — Sabine Baring-Gould

Weed out worry, guilt, hate and fear from your life. Live in the present moment earnestly and wisely, without mourning about the past or anticipating troubles in the future. — Sanchita Pandey

Everyone keeps telling me that time heals all wounds, but no one can tell me what I'm supposed to do right now. Right now I can't sleep. It's right now that I can't eat. Right now I still hear his voice and sense his presence even though I know he's not here. Right now all I seem to do is cry. I know all about time and wounds healing, but even if I had all the time in the world, I still don't know what to do with all this hurt right now. — Nina Guilbeau

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. — Victoria Hanley

We are at last being recognised as the indigenous people of this country whom must share in its future. This is not a day of national mourning for us. We must leave history behind us and look forward. — Galarrwuy Yunupingu

Since you act as though God is dead, I wanted to join you in the mourning.
The reply of Martin Luther's wife, in full funeral regalia, in trying to illustrate the folly of his depressed state. — Mark Driscoll

One of life's greatest paradoxes is that it's in the crucible of pain and suffering that we become tender. Not all pain and suffering, certainly. If that were the case, the whole world would be tender, since no one escapes pain and suffering. To these elements must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love and the willingness to remain vulnerable. Together they lead to wisdom and tenderness. — Brennan Manning

It was when I discovered that there are two kinds of death. There is ceasing to exist, usually accompanied by a funeral and loved ones in mourning. And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive. — Kerry Kletter

Life is not just black and white, there are a million shades in between. — Hanif Hassan Barbhuiya

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches. — Jonathan Swift

And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to me, and think, "Poor girl!" believing they do great justice to my memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my duty, which they are regarding; they will not feel that what to them is but a thought, easily held in those two words of pity, "Poor girl!" was a whole life to me, as full of hours, minutes, and peculiar minutes, of hopes and dreads, smiles, whisperings, tears, as theirs: that it was my world, what is to them their world, and that in that life of mine, however much I cared for them, only as the thought I seem to them to be. Nobody can enter into another's nature truly, that's what is so grievous. — Thomas Hardy

Faris turned on him. "Why choose to wear black today, of all days? I know why I'm in black. Why are you? Mourning?
He looked startled. "One does not wear mourning for a servant."
You still don't understand, do you? He was not my servant."
He regarded her anger, aghast. "What then? What else could he be?
Her empty hands shook as she held them out to him. Her voice shook as she replied, "Glove to my hand." Slowly she closed her fists. "Everything. — Caroline Stevermer

Now let the weeping cease; Let no one mourn again. These things are in the hands of God. — Sophocles

No one ever has the answers you need, the ones you want most, the ones you whisper as you lay alone in your bed with the lights extinguished and the lonely ache of loss settling in. — Lee Thompson

Inherent in mourning is celebration. Mourning without celebration or some form of acceptance leaves you stuck. — Ted Alexandro

there's no point in mourning mistakes when you can fix them — Jess Lourey

The more weapons of violence, the more misery to mankind. The triumph of violence ends in a festival of mourning. — Laozi

Then he crossed his arms over his chest and began to listen to the radiant voices of the slaves singing the six o'clock Salve in the mills, and through the window he saw the diamond of Venus in the sky that was dying forever, the eternal snows, the new vine whose yellow bellflowers he would not see bloom on the following Saturday in the house closed in mourning, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I know few Christians so convinced of the splendor of the rooms in their Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions ... Nor has the Church's ardent "desire to depart, and be with Christ," ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure. — John Ruskin

John [Lennon] as a singer - the way he sings on "Twist and Shout" and the way he sings on "Strawberry Fields Forever" - is a very odd voice, in the sense that it seems to be celebrating but almost mourning at the same time. There's a quality of mourning to his voice, which is very enigmatic. — Alasdair MacLean

Most people are ennobled by the actual presence of death. But how long do you suppose this nobility will last in him? — Henrik Ibsen

No, it's not a 'corpse thing.' I feel I lack the emotional capacity to deal with those in mourning ... — Jen Lancaster

Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world
the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion? — Honore De Balzac

The wind cut like a knife up here, and shrilled in the night like a mother mourning her slain children. — George R R Martin

You are the closest I will ever come to heaven, either here on Earth or in the afterlife, and I will not regret it, not even at the cost of your tears.
So I go to my grave an unrepentant sinner, I'm afraid. There is no use in mourning one such as I, dearest ...
-Simon to Lucy in a letter before the last duel. — Elizabeth Hoyt

I am reaching a point in my life where the basketball chapter in my life is slowly closing from a competition standpoint. — Alonzo Mourning

Before Jaylee, I was always under the impression that people cheated on their spouses because they were seeking something outside of the marriage that was missing. I'm not sure if anything was lacking in my marriage to Robert. I wasn't looking; Jaylee just happened. Now I fear that I will never again experience the heights of desire that I feel when I'm with him and I'm mourning it before it's even gone. — Mara White

It was a huge shock. I've never had hair that short in my life! I think the rest of the cast and crew were mourning my haircut more than I was! But after a while, I felt liberated, I learned to embrace it. — Camilla Belle

I had individuals in my life to help me make the right decisions because it wasn't about them accepting handouts. It was about them making the right decisions for me. — Alonzo Mourning

Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. 'That's not your room,' sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. 'Don't,' said my brother. His voice was clear, full, confidant. Our father stood stunned. He climbed one more step and then turned, descended, looked around, lost.
'My own sons,' he said.
We made a bed for him on a sofa in the living room, but even then Corrigan refused to stay under the same roof; he went walking in the direction of the city center and I wondered what alley he might be found in later that night, what fist he might walk into, whose bottle he might climb down inside. — Colum McCann

We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared. — Stephanie Danler

In mourning, I realized the most painful place on earth was sometimes the church you attended with the person you loved, the person now gone. — Sibella Giorello

Several devices he has to draw souls to sin, and several plots he has to keep souls from all holy and heavenly services, and several stratagems he has to keep souls in a mourning, staggering, doubting and questioning condition. He has several devices to destroy the great and honorable, the wise and learned, the blind and ignorant, the rich and the poor, the real and the nominal Christians. — Thomas Brooks

It was like a death in the family: You go through the mourning stage, then the rebellion, and then all of a sudden you have to find life by yourself ... I loved everything about marriage. I loved having a companion to wake up with and have barbecues with. But things happen and people grow apart. I don't really ever talk about the divorce because it was a heart-wrenching thing to go through. — Jessica Simpson

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. — Danielle Evans

Eternal woman: even in mourning, you want to make a strike, you want to seduce, you want to arouse interest! — Mariama Ba

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. — Dennis Lehane

But aside from those curling green tendrils, the gown was the bright pink of ... of ... of ... All comparisons failed Oliver. It wasn't the bright pink of anything. It was a furious shade of pink, one that nature had never intended. It was a pink that did violence to the notion of demure pastels. It didn't just shout for attention; it walked up and clubbed one over the head. It hurt his head, that pink, and yet he couldn't look away. The room was small enough that he could hear the first words of greeting. "Miss Fairfield," a woman said. "Your gown is ... very pink. And pink is ... such a lovely color, isn't it?" That last was said with a wistful quality in the speaker's voice, as if she were mourning the memory of true pink. — Courtney Milan

LAVINIA: I love everything that grows simply
up toward the sun
everything that's straight and strong! I hate what's warped and twists and eats into itself and dies for a lifetime in shadow ... — Eugene O'Neill

And oh, god, how could so much regret and so much sweetness and so much sadness all be present in that single moment. I was already dead and missing my unlived life. I was already dead and Tobias was mourning.
I tried to smile. For him. — Katherine Applegate

The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave. — Thomas B. Macaulay

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 tragedy in life to mourn over is the death of what lies within a person who is still alive. The death of a potential is a mess of destiny! — Israelmore Ayivor

My fellow Minnesotans join me in mourning the loss of America's 40th President and celebrating the life of a man who personified both the greatness and goodness of America. — Jim Ramstad

Contrary to what a lot of people believe (or hope), comfort doesn't take the pain away. Comfort slides in beside the pain, pulling up a chair so that we have something more than sorrow in our hearts. Comfort gently expands our spirits so that we can breathe again. Comfort opens our eyes so that we can see possibility again.
And on those days, whether it is the next day or five years removed, on that day when grief rears its dark head again, comfort helps us remember that pain is not all there is — Peggy Haymes

When someone died in the wilderness of frontier America, that person's physical remains were buried and the handcarts continued west, but the mourning survivors had hope for their loved one's eternal soul. However, when someone dies spiritually in the wilderness of sin, hope may be replaced by dread and fear for the loved one's eternal welfare. — James E. Faust

The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new "ethical duty to enjoy oneself," a novel "imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others. — Joan Didion

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. — Charles Dickens

Social media reactions to celebrity death have taken on a predictable pattern: an outpouring of shock with expressions of grief, followed by a ghoulish need to know all the details, to see the scene of the death and the family in mourning. Then a post-mortem dissection of all the perceived flaws the celebrity had. — Jennifer Armintrout

So long she held on in this mourning manner, that, what by the
continuall watering of the Basile, and putrifaction of the head, so
buried in the pot of earth; it grew very flourishing, and most
odorifferous to such as scented it, that as no other Basile could
possibly yeeld so sweete a savour. — Giovanni Boccaccio

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

They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions-- only those who do it well and those who don't. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we seek a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like treatment. — Thomas Lynch

Today, there are no prescribed rules for mourning because it takes place outside the rest of American life, and awkward encounters like the one Mary Wilde had at the florist ' s are a natural result of that. And maybe special classifications like "complicated grief" can have the effect of safely categorizing away people to whom horrific things happen, reassuring everyone else that catastrophe is not part of the regular course of human life. Not here, in twenty-first - century America. — Kate Sweeney

There were days I could barely struggle into a size 46 or 48, months of larges and XXLs, and endless rounds of leggings with the elastic at the waist stretched to its limit and beyond - topped with the fashion equivalent of a tea cozy. And always black, because I was in mourning for my slimmer self. — Carrie Fisher

I can't stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death. It isn't an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we've nested in the walls like bacteria. We've taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing - we've made it our own. Or maybe it's life that's the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleaning, a cure. — Lauren Oliver

On the second and the third night there was again a ball -- this time in mid-ocean, during a furious storm sweeping over the ocean, which roared like a funeral mass and rolled up mountainous seas fringed with mourning silvery foam. The Devil, who from the rocks of Gibraltar, the stony gateway of two worlds, watched the ship vanish into night and storm, could hardly distinguish from behind the snow the innumerable fiery eyes of the ship. The Devil was as huge as a cliff, but the ship was even bigger, a many-storied, many-stacked giant, created by the arrogance of the New Man with his ancient heart. — Ivan Bunin

He stepped close to her; she could feel his breath on her neck. "Eve, you make me not want to die."
She turned to see his face. "I didn't want to be this, and now it's all I am."
He put his hands on her cheeks. The look on his face did her in. He was kind, caring, and mourning her losses. Tears wet his cheeks. Eve felt a very deep sob choke her. If he was mourning, so could she.
He pulled her into his arms. "Cry. It's okay. Cry."
Eve felt her knees give. He caught her and carried her to his couch. He petted her hair and let her empty her pain and guilt onto his chest. He kissed the top of her head. For the first time, his actions toward her seemed to have no sexual intent whatsoever.
Eve let go of a rope she'd clung to for too long. And she fell. She fell right into him. Wrong or right, she gave up judging. Her lips found his, and he kissed her gently, not demanding any more than she was willing to offer. — Debra Anastasia

Arin wished Roshar wouldn't do this, wouldn't slip on false arrogance as if it were mourning garb worn in the service of a joke. — Marie Rutkoski

I grew up in a house that was in a constant state of mourning. — Maurice Sendak

Compassion is the feeling of sympathy which the pain of one being awakens in another; and the higher and more human the beings are, the more keenly attuned they are to re-echo the note of suffering, which, like a voice from heaven, penetrates the heart, bringing all creatures a proof of their kinship in the universal God. And as for man, whose function it is to show respect and love for God's universe and all its creatures, his heart has been created so tender that it feels with the whole organic world ... mourning even for fading flowers; so that, if nothing else, the very nature of his heart must teach him that he is required above everything to fe the brother of all beings, and to recognize the claim of all beings to his love and his beneficence.
Horeb, Chapter 17, Verse 125 — Pirkei Avot

A sensible girl would not have been crying, grieving for the boy with the magic in his voice and the blues in his eyes, mourning the loss of something that was a lie-a lie-from beginning to end. — Cinda Williams Chima

Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that's unacceptable. As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn't 'too soon.' It's much too late. — Ezra Klein

After nearly a year of mourning, I feel like the Victorians when Edison came along- all those years in the darkness, and then electric light. I've got the earth between my toes. — Harriet Reuter Hapgood

And here's the shock
when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, you do not experience great joy and huge energy.
You are unhappy. Things get worse.
It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded.
And then all the cowards come out and say, 'See, I told you so.'
In fact, they told you nothing. — Jeanette Winterson

To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war. — Stanley Hauerwas

I stood on the balcony dark with mourning ... hoping the earth would spread its wings in my uninhabited love. — Pablo Neruda

The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives. — Claudia Rankine

I hate mourning," she said. "It always smells of moth balls because it's been laid up somewhere." "You don't need to go on wearing mourning. It's only to go to the funeral in," said Tommy. "Oh no, I know that. In a minute or two I'm going to go up and put on a scarlet jersey just to cheer things up. You can make me another White Lady." "Really, Tuppence, I had no idea that funerals would bring out this party feeling. — Agatha Christie

When you fill life with mourning and complaints, your accomplishments will be a little lower than success. — Auliq Ice

On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents, in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver.
She was a person of sixteen or so
alone, and uncommonly pretty. She was slender and pale, and dressed in mourning, with a black bonnet under which she tucked back a straying twist of blond hair that the wind had teased loose. She had unusually dark brown eyes for one so fair. Her name was Sally Lockhart; and within fifteen minutes, she was going to kill a man. — Philip Pullman

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky - her grand old woods - her fertile fields - her beautiful rivers - her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, - when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing. — Frederick Douglass

running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing — Edith Wharton

Jesus must have the crown of our heart's delight; we will not dishonour our Bridegroom by mourning in his presence. We are ordained to be the minstrels of the skies, let us rehearse our everlasting anthem before we sing it in the halls of the New Jerusalem. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Clown: Good Madonna, why mournest thou?
Olivia: Good Fool, for my brother's death.
Clown:I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.
Olivia:I know his soul is in heaven, Fool.
Clown: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven. — William Shakespeare

Accepting a religion may be more like enjoying a poem, or following the football. It might be a matter of immersion in a set of practices. Perhaps the practices have only an emotional point, or a social point. Perhaps religious rituals only serve necessary psychological and social ends. The rituals of birth, coming of age, or funerals do this. It is silly to ask whether a marriage ceremony is true or false. People do not go to a funeral service to hear something true, but to mourn, or to begin to stop mourning, or to meditate on departed life. It can be as inappropriate to ask whether what is said is true as to ask whether Keats's ode to a Grecian urn is true. The poem is successful or not in quite a different dimension, and so is Chartres cathedral, or a statue of the Buddha. They may be magnificent, and moving, and awe-inspiring, but not because they make statements that are true or false. — Simon Blackburn

When he asked if he was mine, tears in his eyes,
I think he knew what he would do,
what he would have to do,
and he was mourning us.
He was mourning us the whole time. — Emma Forrest

When you are old, at evening candle-lit
beside the fire bending to your wool,
read out my verse and murmur, "Ronsard writ
this praise for me when I was beautiful."
And not a maid but, at the sound of it,
though nodding at the stitch on broidered stool,
will start awake, and bless love's benefit
whose long fidelities bring Time to school.
I shall be thin and ghost beneath the earth
by myrtle shade in quiet after pain,
but you, a crone, will crouch beside the hearth
mourning my love and all your proud disdain.
And since what comes to-morrow who can say?
Live, pluck the roses of the world to-day. — Pierre De Ronsard

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Have you ever had a difference with a dear friend? How his letters, written in the period of love and confidence, sicken and rebuke you! What a dreary mourning it is to dwell upon those vehement protests of dead affection! What lying epitaphs they make over the corpse of love! What dark, cruel comments upon Life and Vanities! Most of us have got or written drawers full of them. They are closet-skeletons which we keep and shun — William Makepeace Thackeray

The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of reality. The right side of your brain, is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious. Your left brain is a scientist,. Your right brain is an artist.
People live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It's only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into the conscious. When someone's injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over a flash, just an instant, and gives them access to divine inspiration. A flash inspiration. A moment of insight.
According to German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom all people over all time. — Chuck Palahniuk

Latimer Springfield was a rather cheerless, oldish young man, who went into politics somewhat in the spirit in which other people might go into half-mourning. — Saki

All throughout Torah, we find people looking for God, and not finding God, because God doesn't often conform to our expectations. God is somewhere other than the place we think to look. And our sages show that you can respond to God's hiddenness in many different ways. You can, like the writer of Lamentations, respond to God's hiddenness by mourning. Or, like the writer of Ecclesiastes, instead of asking where the God you thought you were looking for had gone, ask what God is like now. Or you can respond to God's hiddenness by being like Esther: if God is hiding, then you must act on God's behalf. If you look around the world and wonder where God has gone, why God isn't intervening on behalf of just and righteous causes, your very wondering may be a nudge to work in God's stead. — Lauren F. Winner

Nina had grieved for her loss of power, for the connection she'd felt to the living world. She'd resented this shadow gift. It had seemed like a sham, a punishment. But just as surely as life connected everything, so did death. It was that endless, fast-running river. She'd dipped her fingers into its current, held the eddy of its power in her hand. She was the Queen of Mourning, and in its depths, she would never drown. — Leigh Bardugo

From the great trees the locusts cry
In quavering ecstatic duo-a boy
Shouts a wild call-a mourning dove
In the blue distance sobs-the wind
Wanders by, heavy with odors
Of corn and wheat and melon vines;
The trees tremble with delirious joy as the breeze
Greets them, one by one-now the oak
Now the great sycamore, now the elm. — Hamlin Garland

The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. — Jung Chang

I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning. — Michael Chabon

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. — Sigmund Freud

In Egypt: Under no conditions, under threat of death could anyone kill a cat. People were exceuted for even killing a cat accidentally. And when a cat died, the whole family, and probably their closest friends, went into mourning, the measure of their personal loss signalled by their shaving off their eyebrows. — Roger A. Caras

If our cultural lives are sick, it is likely to be an impediment to our spiritual lives. Much popular culture promotes a spirit of restlessness. That is likely to be an obstacle to prayer, to concerned reflection, and to attentiveness to the needs of others. Popular culture also has an extremely limited range of sensibilities. I have never heard a work of popular music that has the depth of poignancy of the opening bars of Brahms's 'German Requiem,' for example, with its text, 'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.' I learn something about mourning when I hear Brahms; I know of no similar lessons in popular music. — Kenneth A. Myers

Writers on etiquette receive a continuous flow of questions on subjects such as 'When is it too early in the season to wear white accessories?' and 'What is the proper gift to send to a family in mourning?' — Letitia Baldrige

Ten thousand people wrote letters to the governor of Utah, protesting the verdict, but Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad. Before he died he wrote to Bill Haywood, another IWW leader, "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize." Socialism, — Howard Zinn

I remember my wife in white. I remember her walking toward me on our wedding day, a bouquet of red flowers in her hand, and I remember her turning away from me in anger, her body stiff as a stone. I remember the sound of her breath as she slept. I remember the way her body felt in my arms. I remember, always I remember, that she brought solace to my life as well as grief. That for every dark moment we shared between us, there was a moment of such brightness I almost could not bear to look at it head-on. I try to remember the woman she was and not the woman I have built out of spare parts to comfort me in my mourning. And I find, more and more, as the days go by and the balm of my forgiveness washes over the cracked and parched surface of my heart, I find that remembering her as she was is a gift I can give us both. — Carolyn Parkhurst

Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade.
For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.
If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you forever by ordeals endured together. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery