Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

I miss all of my old friends who have passed away. Sometimes you just don't understand why they were taken so soon. I loved and miss Johnny Cash. I miss my old buddy Johnny Paycheck, who happens to be buried in an area of the cemetery that I bought for my family.

When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my heart.

It's too late to fall in love with Sharon Tate / But it's too soon to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb.

Death, vicious death, Leave a green branch for love.

In death, lie. In living, cry. Carry me home to remember to be remembered.

Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak.

We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead.

I like to think that when I fall, A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea, This shelf of books along the wall, Beside my bed, will mourn for me.

You'll come to my grave? To tell me your problems?" My problems? "Yes.' And you'll give me answers? "I'll give you what I can. Don't I always?" I picture his grave, on the hill, overlooking the pond, some little nine foot piece of earth where they will place him, cover him with dirt, put a stone on top. Maybe in a few weeks? Maybe in a few days? I see myself sitting there alone, arms across my knees, staring into space. It won't be the same, I say, not being able to hear you talk. "Ah, talk . . . " He closes his eyes and smiles. "Tell you what. After I'm dead, you talk. And I'll listen.

Each time a friend dies, the present becomes the past, in an instant.

The ocean moans over dead men's bones.

Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.

I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.

I'll never forget the first time I saw someone who had died. It was my grandfather. And I knelt next to his coffin. And all I could do was eye level was look at his hands. They were enormous hands. And all I could think was, 'Those hands dug freedom for me.'

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

Now more than ever, I have learned that, when people die, they truly do live throughout those who love them.

I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.

Americans in the Civil War period were very interested in Heaven and what it might be like, because they were having to face the fact that many of their loved ones were gone and many of their loved ones, they hoped, were in this other realm called Heaven.

I've dealt with losing close ones before, and I've been around friends that have lost friends at a young age. I think it's important to think about - not necessarily death, but about life and think about where you're going and how you want to be remembered and the legacy you want to leave.

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

Our past is who we are, and death is one of our experiences. I lost my husband a long time ago, but it's always yesterday.