Top 100 Death Mourning Quotes
#1. As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.
Roland Barthes
#2. For one of the odd things about death, Trudy has discovered, is that in its wake one must go about business as usual; it seems heartless and wrong, but now that the rituals of mourning have been attended to, the sole task left to Trudy is to try and comprehend the enormity of thes sudden change.
Jenna Blum
#3. You know, I still can't get my head around what happened to Ana. She was there last week. She lent me a pen in English class. How can someone go from lending a pen to being dead?
Lang Leav
#4. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it.
Carl Sagan
#5. 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.
Alessandro Baricco
#6. Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.
Kristina McMorris
#7. To die quickly in one's eighth decade at the very top of one's powers is an enviable end, and not an occasion for mourning.
Brendan Gill
#8. Around the globe, millions more are mourning the death and celebrating the life of Pope John Paul II . Could any other world leader have drawn so many people to one place?
Chris Matthews
#9. My parents were mourning the death of my sister. She was killed in a car accident before I was born, and I didn't know she existed until I was 13 or 14 years old. I knew I was growing up in a house where people were angry and sad.
Andrew Hudgins
#10. Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.
Julian Barnes
#11. 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.
Paul Lowe
#12. 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
#13. Most people are ennobled by the actual presence of death. But how long do you suppose this nobility will last in him?
Henrik Ibsen
#14. Death abides by no one's rules ... it takes what pleases it without consciousness to its decisions. It destroys what it will. It took the pieces of perfection I once knew and shattered them. Now what remains are shards of a dream, drawing blood with every step.
Cassandra Giovanni
#16. Black was not the universal hue of mourning in Europe. In Castile, white obtained on the death of its princes.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#17. I've come to understand that there's a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It's hard to say good- bye and almost impossible to accomplish this alone and ritual is the railing we hold to, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past.
William Kent Krueger
#18. I have remembered Who wept for a parting between the living and the dead.
Charles Dickens
#19. 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
#20. 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.
Dennis Lehane
#21. Grant not my prayers, when they are contrary to Thy will, which at all times must be the best. Oh, hear them not;
Hans Christian Andersen
#22. 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
#24. I think, in real life, when we're facing death - that is, when we come out on the other side of it, whether it's death of a friend or a family member - you come out on the other side of the mourning cherishing your life that much more.
Tony DiTerlizzi
#25. Mourning. At the death of the loved being, acute phase of narcissism: one emerges from sickness, from servitude. Then, gradually, freedom takes on a leaden hue, desolation settles in, narcissism gives way to a sad egoism, an absence of generosity.
Roland Barthes
#26. Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.
Pablo Neruda
#27. I'm not going to lie to you and say it gets easier, because it doesn't. It's just that you get used to it. The human animal has an amazing capacity to get used to almost anything.
Andrea Speed
#29. None mourn more ostentatiously than those who most rejoice at it [a death].
Tacitus
#30. Lady Moon rose an' gazed o'er my busted'n'beautsome Valleys with silv'ry'n'sorryin' eyes, an' the dingos mourned for the died uns.
David Mitchell
#31. There was a time when I was lucky enough to believe that 'There's this girl in Pakistan' would be the worst five words that Al ever said to me. Years later, they would be totally eclipsed by 'They can't find a heartbeat'.
Ruth Ahmed
#32. When I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.
Maggie Stiefvater
#33. When the Grim Reaper comes to call, words fail- they're just too small.
Dixie Lyle
#34. And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself - more birds than women flocking round his body!
Homer
#35. Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death.
Isaiah
#36. 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
#37. During the prayers of the day, there was one less "amen".
Phindiwe Nkosi
#38. He took a deep breath in, still managing himself as if he were resisting temptation. He was a soldier, his father was in the service, too. Crying wasn't something Morell men did. They just didn't.
He hadn't cried at Robbie Morell's funeral.
So he wasn't going to now.
Luke Taylor
#39. Isolation, for him, had become a basic sine qua non for existence and loneliness, his sole companion like a perfectly faithful twin. He was someone for whom even happiness would cry for, mourning the death of his sentiments and murdering the existence of his soul.
Faraaz Kazi
#40. Death moved in the night, in search for blood, and when it found Life, it passed on by, like a cloud that moves by the face of the moon. When he found those dead without the red, he took the life before them born first, and the mourning emptied itself till the morning.
Anthony Liccione
#41. Someone dies, there oughta be something. It oughta shake the world! You're not supposed to walk away!
Lisa Henry
#42. 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
#43. When Princess Diana died, I couldn't understand why people were mourning her death in such an enormous, hysterical way when they didn't actually know her for real.
Alison Jackson
#44. The grave in the woods is unmarked, but Fred can direct the mourner to it unerringly and with immense good will, and I know he and I shall often revisit it, singly and together, in seasons of reflection and despair, on flagless memorial days of our own choosing.
E.B. White
#45. I think maybe Gladstone had it right. I think my father did. 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.
Thomas Lynch
#46. People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.
John Updike
#47. And he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.
Jodi Picoult
#48. If I really cared about Matt, I wouldn't want him to be unhappy. And I was fairly sure that mourning the untimely death of a live-in lover was likely to be a bit of a downer, at least for a day or two.
J.L. Merrow
#49. It's odd, isn't it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it's a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you're not alone.
Kristina McMorris
#50. 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
#51. 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.
Neil Gaiman
#52. 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
#53. How ironic that there always seemed to be more people welcoming your birth and mourning your death than there were throughout your life.
Laurie Bellesheim
#54. 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
#56. The most heaven-like spots I have ever visited, have been certain rooms in which Christ's disciples were awaiting the summons of death. So far from being a "house of mourning," I have often found such a house to be a vestibule of glory.
Theodore L. Cuyler
#57. There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.
Roland Barthes
#59. Instead of hating, my heart cries mercy! Mercy on me! Mercy on me! Mercy on me!
Phindiwe Nkosi
#60. I realized then that for all of us part of the process of mom's dying was mourning, not just her death, but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don't really lose the person who has been.
Will Schwalbe
#62. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
W. H. Auden
#63. I realized that whilst crying over the loss, the living did not seem adequate because they were not my loved one. The room full of strangers hurt me profusely. Even as I saw thousands of young people; I felt incomplete and more saddened because the one I wanted to see was buried.
Phindiwe Nkosi
#64. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, and be the one who ended up in that accident, completely dead ... but you know what? It wouldn't change anything. All I can do now that they're dead is to go through the actions of living without really living, and hope it improves someday.
Rebecca McNutt
#65. He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who's learned to love the sensation of being pierced.
Michael Cunningham
#66. Don't cry for the dead, for the dead is deaf, dumb, blind, lame, unemotional and dead.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#67. 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
#68. His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science.
{Describing Ernest Rutherford upon his death at age 66. Thomson, then 80 years old, was once his teacher.}
J.J. Thomson
#69. Franklin was the best known of the Founding Fathers. His death could not go without some sort of official notice. The House of Representatives, after listening to a brief tribute by James Madison, voted to wear badges of mourning for two months and then got on with business.
Edmund Morgan
#70. Fred!" the nurse said, though they had never met. "How are we today?" Reading the nurse's name tag, Mr. Bennet replied with fake enthusiasm, "Bernard! We're mourning the death of manners and the rise of overly familiar discourse. How are you?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#71. Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn; And he alone is bless'd who ne'er was born.
Matthew Prior
#72. Death never pierces the heart so much as when it takes someone we love; cleaving the heart they held with their passing.
Brandon M. Herbert
#73. 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.
H.S. Crow
#74. People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.
Lee Smith
#75. Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
Anna Quindlen
#76. It's said people can sense their imminent death. Maybe they hear death's song in the wind. Or the earth stops turning for a second, mourning those who are yet to pass.
Jayde Scott
#77. 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.
Joan Didion
#78. What is it like when you lose someone you love?" Jane asked.
"You die, too. And you wait around for your body to catch up.
John Scalzi
#79. 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
#80. I've grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It's weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.
Rosie Thomas
#81. Those who do not care, escape the anguish of mourning but never know the delights of love. The meaning of life forever eludes them.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#82. After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?
Ernst Toller
#83. It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
#85. Pak Karman hugged his wife's gravestone tightly. "You left without saying farewell!" The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
#86. I lived my grief; I slept mourning and ate sorrow and drank tears. I ignored all else.
Robin Hobb
#87. 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.
Natsuo Kirino
#88. Mistake this day as being like any other, and your deaths will go as unmourned as the insects of the field.
A.J. Darkholme
#89. Grief is NOT a mental illness or an emotional disorder. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never experienced it for themselves.
Rebecca McNutt
#90. 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
#91. She was mourning all her life - not for her husband, who had released her with his death, but for her own dead heart.
Judith Ortiz Cofer
#92. Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.
Kristina McMorris
#93. As the sun starts to rise, I watch as Raffaele bends over Enzo's body, the two of us mourning the prince we both loved.
Marie Lu
#94. Even now, I feel your arms around me
My breath is your breath and yours mine
Even now, I hear you laughing like bells ...
You sing to me and I sing to you
Dear child of my womb, my love,
Time has left us, left us forever together.
Victor Robert Lee
#95. The attitude of mourning is a faithless attitude, an ignorant attitude. The more we know, the more fully we shall trust, for we shall feel with utter certainty that we and our dead are alike in the hands of perfect Power and perfect Wisdom, directed by perfect Love.
Charles Webster Leadbeater
#96. The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.
Stephen King
#97. Why do they lie?" she asked herself aloud. "They say time makes losing someone you loved easier to deal with, but it only makes it worse.
Rebecca McNutt
#98. LAVINIA: I want to feel love! Love is all beautiful! I never used to know that! I was a fool! We'll be married soon ... We'll make an island for ourselves on land and we'll have children and love them and teach them to love life so that they can never be possessed by hate and death!
Eugene O'Neill
#99. My mom was there, in some form, in some sense, in some universe. My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locks
and the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper.
She lived.
Kami Garcia
#100. Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?
Julia Kristeva
