David Novak Quotes

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.

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

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

None mourn more ostentatiously over the death of Germanicus than those who most rejoice at it [a death].

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.

They teach you how to handle life in England, but they don’t teach you a thing about death. There’s no book telling you what to do when your mum or dad dies.

We met Dr. Hall in such deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead.

I turned and faced the Olympians. "We need a shroud," I announced, my voice cracking. "A shroud for the son of Hermes.

What does one do about the dead? They live forever.

Have you noticed that only death arouses our emotions? How we love thee friends who have just passed away, right? How we admire those master who no longer speak, their mouths full of dirt. We them we are not obligated.

By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

Hired mourners at a funeral say and do - A little more than they whose grief is true

All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist

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

Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground.

Ring out your bells! Let mourning show be spread! For Love is dead.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living.

Funerals are all abstract ceremony.

So mourn'd the dame of Ephesus her love.

It's a terrible thing when a person dies, whatever the circumstances. A hole opens up in the world, and we need to pay the proper respects. If we don't, the hole will never be filled in again.

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.