612 Quotes About Mourning

[W]e’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it.

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.

In the months that followed my mother's death, I managed to look like a normal person. I walked the street; I answered my phone; I brushed my teeth; most of the time. But I was not OK. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. Dishes piled in the sink, knives crusted with strawberry jam. At one point I did not wash my hair for ten days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of everyday.

That was the first time I experienced the desperate orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourning: it was the one place where people mingled and touched bodies and shared emotions without restraint or guilt. There was a wild, sexually flavored frenzy in the air. Later, when I saw a slogan by Khomeini saying that the Islamic Republic survives through its mourning ceremonies, I could testify to its truth.

Mourning is never really complete. The mappings of the old play remain in the cortex, like those mappings of the phantom limb.

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.

You want to move on, but to do that you have to let her go, and you don't want to let her go, so you don't move on.

Two days after your death, in a dream you text me many times. I read the first of them. ME! And so are the living comforted.

Elle n'aimait pas parler d'elle, encore moins qu'on en dise du bien. Je vais en profiter, maintenant qu'elle est partie.