Mourning Quotes

1. "...the news should help us with mourning the twisted nature of man and reconciling us to the difficulty of being able to imagine perfection while still not managing to secure it – for a range of stupid but nevertheless unbudgeable reasons...The news currently resists giving us the single most calming response one can offer to certain problems: evidence that they are normal and that they belong to a species which is intrinsically (rather than exceptionally) imperfect."
Author: Alain De Botton

2. "Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it."
Author: Alan Bennett

3. "On a day of burial there is no perspective--for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was--to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain."
Author: Antoine De Saint Exupéry

4. "You do not see the river of mourning because it lacks one tear of your own."
Author: Antonio Porchia

5. "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."
Author: Camilla Belle

6. "Losing people you love affects you. It is buried inside of you and becomes this big, deep hole of ache. It doesn't magically go away, even when you stop officially mourning."
Author: Carrie Jones

7. "When you weep, Jesus weeps with you. And together you enter into the dance of tears. The dance of tears with Jesus is a precious intimacy He shares only with those who have known deep suffering. In the dance of tears, Jesus shares your pain. He carries your deep sorrows in His everlasting arms. And He ultimately turns your mourning into dancing. He revives and saves your crushed spirit. What a blessed comfort in our deepest darkness to know the One who shares the depth of every pain and loss, every joy and gladness. Jesus, He is the One."
Author: Catherine Martin

8. "Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

9. "I'm mourning with the rest of the world for the talented, gorgeous, funny, intelligent John Forsythe but my heart is broken for the loss of my dear, dear friend and neighbor. I will miss him terribly."
Author: Cheryl Ladd

10. "He spent too much time mourning what could have been and questioning what should be."
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

11. "Your Blake is mourning something. I think that pain is manifesting as his glass-skin delusions. You're going to have to approach him as if he's in one of those tents I walk into. My advice is this: Listen, Livia. Listen to him. Saying words out loud can heal."
Author: Debra Anastasia

12. "(Nicholas)"Am I dead?"An odd question, but then she rememberd her mourning attire. "No sir, you are not."He relaxed a moment, then turned his head slightly as if searching for other passengers. His brows dived in a scowl.Am I married?"She wasn't sure how to answer. His kid gloves hid any evidence of his matrimonial state, but his expression of instantaneous alarm and regret suggested he was referring specifically to her. No sir, we are not."
Author: Donna MacMeans

13. "... 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."
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

14. "I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginningwhat couldn't happen. What couldn't happendidn't. The enterprise is abandoned.But half our life is dreams, delirium, everything that underliesthat feedsthat keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi-sanity, we allowothers to see. The half of me that feeds the restis in mourning. Mourns. Each time we mustmourn, we fear this is the final mourning, this timemourning never will lift."
Author: Frank Bidart

15. "The mayor informed General Petronio San Roman of the episode, down to the last literal phrase, in an alarming telegram. General San Roman must have followed his son's wishes to the letter, because he didn't come for him, but sent his wife with their daughters and two other older women who seemed to be her sisters. They came on a cargo boat, locked in mourning up to their necks because of Bayardo San Roman's misfortunes, and with their hair hanging loose in grief. Before stepping onto land, they took off their shoes and went barefoot through the streets up to the hilltop in the burning dust of noon, pulling out strands of hair by the roots and wailing loudly with such high-pitched shrieks that they seemed to be shouts of joy. I watched them pass from Magdalena Oliver's balcony, and I remember thinking that distress like theirs could only be put on in order to hide other, greater shames."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

16. "When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on."
Author: Gloria Steinem

17. "It is not a Christmas tree!" said the King, so firmly that all the girls stopped jumping about. "This is a house of mourning. It is nothing more than a tree. I thought it would look nice. Inside. That is all."
Author: Heather Dixon

18. "The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature-of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if anyone should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?"
Author: Henry David Thoreau

19. "Doesn't the devil live forever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any person wearing mourning for the devil?"
Author: Herman Melville

20. "His wife...always dressed in mourning for the children who died in infancy and squeezed breathless by the pressure of her corset, her religion, and the husband fate had dealt her"
Author: Isabel Allende

21. "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."
Author: Ivan Bunin

22. "He felt the comfort of being part of an eternal cycle symbolized by the gold strips on either side of the black mourning band he wore. Light, dark, light. The dark was just an interval."
Author: Jack Campbell

23. "Here again, the difference between the effective and the virtual, between mourning and its possibility, seems fragile and porous. The anguished apprehension of mourning (without which the act of friendship would not spring forth in its very energy) insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself; it haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning. This apprehension weeps before the lamentation, it weeps death before death, and this is the very respiration of friendship, the extreme of its possibility. Hence surviving is at once the essence, the origin and the possibility, the condition of possibility of friendship; it is the grieved act of loving. This time of surviving thus gives the time of friendship."
Author: Jacques Derrida

24. "Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is."
Author: James Joyce

25. "As I walk through the redwood trees, my sneakers sopping up days of rain, I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes, when grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe."
Author: Jandy Nelson

26. "We met Dr. Hall in such very deep mourning that either his wife, his mother or himself must be dead"
Author: Jane Austen

27. "But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason... Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning."
Author: Jane Yolen

28. "It's hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years."
Author: Janine Di Giovanni

29. "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."
Author: Jim Ramstad

30. "Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention."
Author: Joan Didion

31. "Are ye the ghosts of fallen leaves, O flakes of snow, For which, through naked trees, the winds A-mourning go?"
Author: John B. Tabb

32. "They which have no hope of a life to come, may extend their griefs for the loss of this, and equal the days of their mourning with the years of the life of man."
Author: John Pearson

33. "(I wonder what he would have thought about this internet thingy. ;))Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process [...] Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech [...] What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless"
Author: John Steinbeck

34. "In one blow, that dream died as they dragged me—him—away. A tear slid down my cheek. I wasn't the only one mourning the loss of a dream. "I'm sorry." 'You're not alone, I just wanted you to know that. And someday, when I have my powers back and am free, I'm going to do some serious damage to the people who've hurt you."
Author: Kimberly Kinrade

35. "It's wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There's nothing to be accomplished by it."
Author: Margaret Atwood

36. "There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam,your subterfuge,your ordinary mirage.You stand red-handed.You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grassWhat are you supposed to dowith all this loss?In the daylight we knowwhat's gone is gone,but at night it's different.Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunkslurching sideways through the doorswe open to them in sleep;these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,even those we have loved the most,especially those we have loved the most,returning from where we shoved themaway too quickly:from under the ground, from under the water,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go."
Author: Margaret Atwood

37. "For years she had had her back against the stone wall of Rhett's love and had taken it as much for granted as she had taken Melanie's love, flattering herself that she drew her strength from herself alone. And even as she had realized earlier in the evening that Melanie had been beside her in her bitter campaigns against life, now she knew that silent in the background, Rhett had stood, loving her, understanding her, ready to help. Rhett at the bazaar, reading her impatience in her eyes and leading her out in the reel, Rhett helping her out of the bondage of mourning, Rhett convoying her through the fire and explosion the night Atlanta fell, Rhett lending her the money that gave her her start, Rhett who comforted her when she woke in the nights crying with fright from her dreams-why, no man did such things without loving a woman to distraction!"
Author: Margaret Mitchell

38. "Eternal woman: even in mourning, you want to make a strike, you want to seduce, you want to arouse interest!"
Author: Mariama Bâ

39. "Come, Victor; not brooding thoughts of vengeance against the assassin, but with feelings of peace and gentleness, that will heal, instead of festering, the wounds of our minds. Enter the house of mourning, my friend, but with kindness and affection for those who love you, and not with hatred for your enemies." Alphonse Frankenstein"
Author: Mary Shelley

40. "Nothing says "deeply in mourning" like canapés and free beer."
Author: Mira Grant

41. "But there is no easy way to mourn a child.p 269Savannah mourning her daughter Esther"
Author: Nancy E. Turner

42. "Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?""Then what died? who are you mourning?""A point of view."
Author: Neil Gaiman

43. "He took me in skeptically. "Darling, the ensemble is fabulous," he said, patting my hand, eyeing my black jacket, black tie, black silk shirt, and heavily pegged black satin pants, "but I'm not so sure about the white sneakers.""But they're essential to my costume.""Your costume? What are you dressed as?""A tennis player in mourning."
Author: Patti Smith

44. "This is called a piqué machine, it sews that finest stitch, called piqué, requires far more skill than the other stitches.... This is called a polishing machine and that is called a stretcher and you are called honey and I am called Daddy and this is called living and the other is called dying and this is called madness and this is called mourning and this is called hell, pure hell, and you have to have strong ties to be able to stick it out, this is called trying-to-go-on-as-though-nothing-has-happened and this is called paying-the-full-price-but-in-God's-name-for-what, this is called wanting-to-be-dead-and-wanting-to-find-her-and-to-kill-her-and-to-save-her-from-whatever-she-is-going-through-wherever-on-earth-she-may-be-at-this-moment, this unbridled outpouring is called blotting-out-everything and it does not work, I am half insane, the shattering force of that bomb is too great ... And then they were back at his office again."
Author: Philip Roth

45. "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."
Author: Roger A. Caras

46. "Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering."
Author: Roland Barthes

47. "When you get tired of worrying and mourning your horse and trying not to be afraid, tell me and I'll do it for you a while so you can shut your eyes and sleep peaceful."
Author: Shannon Hale

48. "Still others, like Kavita, just sit and sit, sometimes for hours. They are the ones, she now understands, who are mourning. Like her, they mourn a loss so wide and sodeep and so all-encompassing that it threatens to wash them away with grief."
Author: Shilpi Somaya Gowda

49. "For a while, Mirabelle believes there will be a moment when he will cave in and let himself love her, but eventually she lets the idea go. She hits bottom. She dwells in the muck for several months, not depressed exactly, but involved in a mourning that at first she thinks is for Ray but soon realizes is for the loss of her old self."
Author: Steve Martin

50. "Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm. Mourning the split trees, hens starving on rooftops. Figuring out what can be done to save them since they cannot save themselves without me because- well, its my storm, isn't it? I break lives to prove I can mend them back again. And although the pain is theirs, I share it, don't I? Of course. Of course. I wouldn't have it any other way. But it is another way. I am uneasy now. Feeling a bit false. What, I wonder, what would I be without a few brilliant spots of blood to ponder? Without aching words that set, then miss, the mark?"
Author: Toni Morrison

Mourning Quotes Pictures