He felt the comfort of being part of an eternal cycle symbolized by the gold strips on either side of the black mourning band he wore. Light, dark, light. The dark was just an interval.

Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.

The living mourn the dead for a time but they forget about them as days pass. The living are so selfish, so spoilt, so taken with the very act of living that they don't remember long.

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself—more birds than women flocking round his body!

My mom was there, in some form, in some sense, in some universe. My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locksand the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper.She lived.

Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing...

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

And it never mattered who the man I portrayed him to be was. The memory was in the same place as the fantasy, and that place was proven so contorted, convoluted, I'm unsure if I ever told the truth.

Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.

After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable - so young, so much a citizen of a different era - that it is hard to feel fully deprived.

and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.

I feel about my dogs now, and all the dogs I had prior to this, the way I feel about children—they are that important to me. When I have lost a dog I have gone into a mourning period that lasted for months.

I feel I've lost every part of me...there's nothing left but the parts I've given to you. I need you to hold those pieces together. Please don't forget who I was...then...then there really will be nothing left.

He was seven years old the summer that his life ended. He'd always felt like his life was taken the moment that truck rammed into his father and sister. Or at least, the life he would have had was ended before it even began.