No Mourners No Funerals Quotes

No mourners, no funerals. Another way of saying good luck. But it was something more. A dark wink to the fact that there would be no expensive burials for people like them, no marble markers to remember their names, no wreaths of myrtle and rose. ~ Leigh Bardugo

See you in Djerholm harbour," Specht called. "No mourners." "No funerals," the others replied. Strange people. ~ Leigh Bardugo

No mourners. No funerals. Among them, it passed for 'good luck. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Why do you guys say that, anyway? No mourners, no funerals? Why not just say good luck or be safe?"
"We like to keep our expectations low. ~ Leigh Bardugo

I once asked a rabbi in a large congregation which prayers he used with the dying. "You mean the Mourner's Kaddish?" he asked, referring to the prayer recited on behalf of the deceased. "No," I replied. "I mean the prayers said when a person is actually dying." "Oh," he replied. "I don't know. I've never seen anyone die." He had been a congregational rabbi for almost twenty years. "I only get called when it's time to do the funeral," he explained. Clearly there is much to learn within our traditional religious communities. ~ Megory Anderson

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. "& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. "& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. "& that nobody is wished to see my dead body. "& that no mourners walk behind me at my funeral. "& that no flowers be planted on my grave, "& that no man remember me. "To this I put my name. ~ Thomas Hardy

ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'D And did young Stephen sicken, And did young Stephen die? And did the sad hearts thicken, And did the mourners cry? No; such was not the fate of Young Stephen Dowling Bots; Though sad hearts round him thickened, 'Twas not from sickness' shots. No whooping-cough did rack his frame, Nor measles drear with spots; Not these impaired the sacred name Of Stephen Dowling Bots. Despised love struck not with woe That head of curly knots, Nor stomach troubles laid him low, Young Stephen Dowling Bots. O no. Then list with tearful eye, Whilst I his fate do tell. His soul did from this cold world fly By falling down a well. They got him out and emptied him; Alas it was too late; His spirit was gone for to sport aloft In the realms of the good and great. If ~ Mark Twain

On the Gallows Once
Kofi Awoonor

I crossed quite a few
of your rivers, my gods,
into this plain where thirst reigns
I heard the cry of mourners
the long cooing of the African wren at dusk
the laughter of the children at dawn
had long ceased
night comes fast in our land
where indeed are the promised vistas
the open fields, blue skies, the singing birds
and abiding love?
History records acts
of heroism, barbarism
of some who had power
and abused it massively
of some whose progenitors
planned for them
the secure state of madness
from which no storm can shake them;
of some who took the last ships
disembarked on some far-off shores and forgot
of some who simply laid down the load
and went home to the ancestors ~ Kofi Awoonor

Dear mourners,' he begins, 'let me first tell you that truth must always be spoken, no matter that it hurts. For truth untold is wicked, damning. It corrupts, begs rebellion. Rebellion being the right of those who are themselves corrupted. It becomes the way of their truth, and, without it, they are dead. ~ Peter Gray

I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?"
"And are there?"
"Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about ~ John Green

You Don't Know What Love Is
But you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want
to get into the fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she's headed, you know she'll wake up
with an ache she can't locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through. ~ Kim Addonizio

The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work - I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate - but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one's address book dressed in black and exported into pews in non alphabetical order. ~ Chris Cleave

We have trauma, and we have grief. People die, and we find it baffling. Painful. Inexplicable. Grief is baffling. There are theories on how we react to loss and death, how we cope, how we handle loss. Some believe the range of emotions mourners experience is predictable, that grief can be monitored, as if mourners are following a checklist. But sorrow is less of a checklist, more like water. It's fluid, it has no set shape, never disappears, never ends. It doesn't go away. It just changes. It changes us. ~ Mira Ptacin

How the soldiers had lain, slain and forgotten, no marker for their demise, no songs to their name, not even mourners who knew them. That is the end of battle, and once a man has tasted it, how hesitant he is to lift another spoonful to his lips. ~ R.W. Schmidt

We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever took we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, that exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theaters. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder. ~ Willa Cather

No parent should have to bury a child ... No mother should have to bury a son. Mothers are not meant to bury sons. It is not in the natural order of things.
I buried my son. In a potter's field. In a field of Blood. In empty, acrid silence. There was no funeral. There were no mourners. His friends all absent. His father dead. His sisters refusing to attend. I discovered his body alone, I dug his grave alone, I placed him in a hole, and covered him with dirt and rock alone. I was not able to finish burying him before sundown, and I'm not sure if that affected his fate ...
I begrudge God none of this. I do not curse him or bemoan my lot. And though my heart keeps beating only to keep breaking--I do not question why.
I remember the morning my son was born as if it was yesterday. The moment the midwife placed him in my arms, I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding. I remember holding my son, and looking over at my own mother and saying, "Now I understand why the sun comes up at day and the stars come out at night. I understand why rain falls gently. Now I understand you, Mother" ...
I loved my son every day of his life, and I will love him ferociously long after I've stopped breathing. I am a simple woman. I am not bright or learn-ed. I do not read. I do not write. My opinions are not solicited. My voice is not important ... On the day of my son's birth I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding ... The world tells me ~ Stephen Adly Guirgis

The funeral is a quiet one, despite the number of mourners present. There are no sobs or flailing handkerchiefs. There is a smattering of color amongst the sea of traditional black. Even the light rain cannot push it down into the realms of despair. It rests instead in a space of thoughtful melancholy. ~ Erin Morgenstern

At Azzam's funeral, days later, a brokenhearted Zindani tried to hold the movement together. Standing before hundreds of mourners on a hill outside Peshawar, he made an impassioned plea, his voice rising and falling in the microphone, as he praised Azzam's ability to reconcile different factions and called for unity now that Azzam was gone. But Zindani couldn't replace Azzam. No one could. ~ Gregory D. Johnsen

Tell all my mourners
To mourn in red-
Cause there ain't no sense
In my bein' dead. ~ Langston Hughes

There are no mourners here. No tourists. No rubberneckers. No one to sideswipe Tommy's car. ~ Nova Ren Suma

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name.
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.
For since each hand hath put on nature's pow'r,
Fairing the foul with art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bow'r,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with a false esteem.
  Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
  That every tongue says beauty should look so. ~ William Shakespeare

They come into white people's lives like that in sudden sharp black trickles that isolate white facts for an instant in unarguable truth like under a microscope; the rest of the time just voices that laugh when you see nothing to laugh at, tears when no reason for tears. They will bet on the odd or even number of mourners at a funeral. A brothel full of them in Memphis went into a religious trance ran naked into the street. It took three policemen to subdue one of them. Yes Jesus O good man Jesus O that good man. The ~ William Faulkner

Now it has been said from ancient times that all women who weep may be divided into three sorts. There are those who lift up their voices and their tears flow and this may be called crying; there are those who utter loud lamentations but whose tears do not flow and this may be called howling; there are those whose tears flow but who utter no sound and this may be called weeping. Of all those women who followed Wang Lung in his coffin, his wives and his sons' wives and his maid servants and his slaves and his hired mourners, there was only one who wept and it was Pear Blossom. ~ Pearl S. Buck

Oh, I believe you. It's too ridiculous not to be true. It's just that each time my world gets stranger, I think: Right. We're at maximum oddness now. At least I know the full extent of it. First, I find out my brother and I are descended from the pharaohs and have magic powers. All right. No problem. Then I find out my dead father has merged his soul with Osiris and Why not? Then my uncle takes over the House of Life and oversees hundreds of magicians around the world. Then my boyfriend turns out to be a hybrid magician boy/immortal god of funerals. And all the while I'm thinking, Of course! Keep calm and carry on! I've adjusted! And then you come along on a random Thursday, la-di-da, and say, Oh, by the way, Egyptian gods are just one small part of the cosmic absurdity. We've also got the Greeks to worry about! Hooray! ~ Rick Riordan

My father? A hard drinking man from the 70's. We actually have no pictures of my dad where he is not holding a beer. Weddings, Funerals, Water Skiing, Parent-Teacher Conference. When I got sick around him as a kid growing up, he'd always warm me up a shot of 100 proof whiskey. Never got sick ... that I can remember. ~ Christopher Titus

The biggest problem is the funerals that don't exist. People call the funeral home, they pick up the body, they mail the ashes to you, no grief, no happiness, no remembrance, no nothing. That happens more often than it doesn't in the United States. ~ Caitlin Doughty

Because,' he said - thinking, Because sex is wonderful, and who wouldn't want to do it as much as possible? Because sex is ecstasy, and there's no ecstasy left in this civilization anymore. Because we thought penicillin could cure everything. Because people are looking for Love. Because in this society we can't find support for stable partnerships. Because we're ashamed, and seek out sex with a stranger we don't have to say hello to in the street the next day, much less mention at our funerals. Because, because, because, he thought, and then he turned to her and said. 'Why do you smoke?' (196). ~ Andrew Holleran

Take a look at my life
its just a handful of memories
From misdemeanours to felonies
Funerals of family
Look at my life
Ain't exactly what i planned it'd be
And life, Is this really what it's all about?
My life, It ain't no mystery to figure out
My life, I got a couple rhymes I scribbled out
Guess i took a different route
Take a look at my life ~ Ko

Very few conversations with Charles Dickens did not include a laugh from him. I had never met a man so given to laughter. Almost no moment or context was too serious for this author not to find some levity in it, as some of us had discovered to our embarrassment at funerals. ~ Dan Simmons

The kings of terrors, the last enemy, will never be able to breach the pearly gates and disturb the bliss of heaven! No more deathbed vigils or funerals. The hearse will have made its last journey. ~ J. Oswald Sanders

Katsa has wondered if a person could ever build wings to fly with."
"What do you mean, to fly with?" said Bitterblue, suddenly irate.
"You know what I mean."
"You'll only encourage her to believe it can be done."
"I have no doubt it can be done."
"To what purpose?" snapped Bitterblue.
Po's eyebrows rose. "Flying would be its own purpose, Cousin. Don't worry, no one would ever expect the queen to do it."
No, I'll be left with the honor of planning the funerals. ~ Kristin Cashore

The ceremonies that persist - birthdays, weddings, funerals - focus only on ourselves, marking rites of personal transition. […]
We know how to carry out this rite for each other and we do it well. But imagine standing by the river, flooded with those same feelings as the Salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Rise in their honor, thank them for all the ways they have enriched our lives, sing to honor their hard work and accomplishments against all odds, tell them they are our hope for the future, encourage them to go off into the world to grow, and pray that they will come home. Then the feasting begins. Can we extend our bonds of celebration and support from our own species to the others who need us?
Many indigenous traditions still recognize the place of ceremony and often focus their celebrations on other species and events in the cycle of the seasons. In a colonist society the ceremonies that endure are not about land; they're about family and culture, values that are transportable from the old country. Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed there, but it seems they did not survive emigration in any substantial way. I think there is wisdom in regenerating them here, as a means to form bonds with this land. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

By the 1980s, practically no one under 60 in the real civilian world wore hats for anything except weddings, funerals or Ascot. Hats had been in competition with hair, and hair had won. Thirty years before that, Brits of all classes and ages wore hats all the time. ~ Peter York

Thousands of people are being buried and no one attends the funerals,' said one of the soldiers. 'In peacetime it's the other way round: one coffin and a hundred people carrying flowers. ~ Vasily Grossman

Dear America,
I suppose we should introduce ourselves: We're South Louisiana ... You probably already know that we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you'd probably hire an exterminator to get out of your yard.
We dance even if there's no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large and, frankly,we're suspicious of others who don't. ~ Chris Rose