Quotes About Mourning

Many accuse conservatism of being no more than a highly-wrought work of mourning, a translation into the language of politics of the yearning for childhood that lies deep in us all.

Your woman is gone and your heart is heavy. Words will not lighten the weight, and what is written is written. But let it also be put down that I grieve with you. ~Hasan~

Like love, mourning affects the world—and the worldly—with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me.

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.

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.

I transform Work in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real Work - of writing.) for: the Work by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love, grief) cannot be liquidated hastily: for me, it is accomplished only in and by writing.

What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis. [Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]

I waver—in the dark—between the observation (but is it entirely accurate?) that I'm unhappy only by moments, by jerks and surges, sporadically, even if such spasms are close together—and the conviction that deep down, in actual fact, I am continually, all the time, unhappy since maman's death.

Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman's belongings. Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.

Only I know what my road has been for the last year and a half: the economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular mourning that has kept me unceasingly separate by its demands; a separation that I have ultimately always projected to bring to a close by a book--Stubbornness, secrecy.

I limp along through my mourning.

Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don't know how to restore generosity to my life--or love. How to love?

The grim egoism (egotism) of mourning of suffering

The measurement of mourning: eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother.

It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.

The true act of mourning is not to suffer from the loss of the loved object; it is to discern one day, on the skin of the relationship, a certain tiny stain, appearing there as the symptom of a certain death : for the first time I am doing harm to the one I love, involuntarily, of course, but without panic.

Embarrassed and almost quickly because sometimes I feel that my mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion. But all my life haven't I been just that: moved?

Embarrassed and almost guilty because sometimes I feel that my mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion. But all my life haven't I been just that: moved?

Nije li najbolnija to?ka tog žalovanja u tome što moram izgubiti jedan jezik - ljubavni jezik? Svršeno je s onim 'Volim te.')

Buscamos a tientas la pared, como los ciegos; andamos a tientas como si no tuviéramos ojos; tropezamos en el mediodía como si fuera de noche; nos encontramos en lugares desolados como si hubiéramos muerto. Rugimos como osos y gemimos doloridos como tórtolas…;

Do you think they missed him terribly when he fell? Did God cry over his lost angel, I wonder?

It's the living who are left to suffer. A hard truth, but that's the way it is.

at the end of the day, the people left behind matter as much as the ones who are missing. We mourn the ones we've lost, but we agonize over the pieces of ourselves they took with them. The identities we'll never have again. The emotions we're certain we'll never feel again. The sense of our own selves, becoming undone and disappearing just as completely and suddenly as those who vanished.

But that was before I saw her coming down those stairs reincarnated as a goddess. A goddess in mourning. Those emblems of bereavement kept alive the pity, the religious adoration, the sense that my beloved was a spirit who must be worshiped in spirit. But out of the black bodice rose the luminous column of the neck; between the coils of honey-colored hair the face was transfigured by a kind of unearthly radiance.