Mourning Traditions Quotes

No known human group... simply throw out its dead without any ritual or ceremony. In stark contrast, no animal practices burial of dead individuals of its own species.

We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.

Nothing says "deeply in mourning" like canapés and free beer.

There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren't for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family's turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.

Our respect for the dead, when they are just dead, is something wonderful, and the way we show it more wonderful still. We show it with black feathers and black horses; we show it with black dresses and black heraldries; we show it with costly obelisks and sculptures of sorrow, which spoil half of our beautiful cathedrals. We show it with frightful gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone, in the midst of the quiet grass; and last, and not least, we show it by permitting ourselves to tell any number of falsehoods we think amiable or credible in the epitaph.

Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own.

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, "He is better off."

From the time an Aiel boy becomes a man he will not sing anything but battle chants, or their dirge for the slain. I have heard them singing over their dead, and over those they have killed. That song is one to make the stones weep.

...and motioned me toward a spot next to a middle-aged Moroi in a very formal and very designer black suit. The suit screamed, I'm sorry the queen is dead, and I'm going to look fashionable while showing my grief

The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter.

There should be celebration rallies when people die... We believe in dialectics, and so we can't not be in favor of death.

The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon earth,-- The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more.

Th' dead ar-re always pop'lar. I knowed a society wanst to vote a monyment to a man an' refuse to help his fam'ly, all in wan night.

As traditions of mourning wane, women's role as designated mourners has also vanished. In consequence, the woman elegist must summon her own resources as an artist.

I'm thinking of being a professional mourner. How hard can it be? Tear at your hair, sing a dirge or two, take the rest of the week off.

The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.