Francois Mauriac Quotes

For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.

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

Left love behind many years ago. Now it rests under a cross in the cemetery in Tombstone.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

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

The dead are never far from us. They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.

Low on his funeral couch he lies!

Passing away" is written on the world and all the world contains.

The problem with death is absence

Requiescat Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone She is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life’s buried here, Heap earth upon it.

To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost.

I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.

... I have no letter from the dead, yet daily love them more.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

When the friends we love the best Lie in their churchyard bed, We must not cry too bitterly Over the happy dead.

Lay her i' the earth: And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest, A ministering angel shall my sister be, When thou liest howling. HAMLET. What, the fair Ophelia! QUEEN GERTRUDE. Sweets to the sweet: farewell!

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

Cold inthe earthand the deepsnow piled abovethee, Far, far, removed, cold in the dreary grave! Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, Severed at last byTime's all-serving wave?

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

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

They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here.