Quotes from Philippe Ariès

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

Too evident sorrow does not inspire pity but repugnance, it is the sign of mental instability or of bad manners: it is morbid.

An acceptable death is a death which can be accepted or tolerated by the survivors. It has its antithesis: 'the embarrassingly graceless dying,' which embarrasses the survivors because it causes too strong an emotion to burst forth; and emotions must be avoided both in the hospital and everywhere in society. One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private, that is to say, secretly.

These people no doubt became more common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and judging from La Fontaine, those who tried to cheat death were found primarily among the old: He who most resembles the dead is the most reluctant to die. Eighteenth-century