The moderns had never written anything one wanted to read about death … “and now can never mourn, can never mourn, … From the contagion of the world’s slow stain” … for there are moments when it seems utterly futile … simply one doesn’t believe, thought Clarissa, any more in God.

—Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street”

Thou thy worldly task hast done, Mrs. Dalloway read. Tears unshed, tears deep, salt, still, stood about her for all deaths & sorrows.

—Woolf, The Hours

When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.

—Sigmund Freud, “On Transience” (1916)