Quotations

«Jerusalem is a festival and a lamentation. Its song is a sigh across the ages, a delicate, robust, mournful psalm at the great junction of spiritual cultures.»

«Citizens have the natural right and the common sense duty to protect themselves, their families, their communities, and their property...guns are the equalizing tools of self-protection, utopian lamentations notwithstanding.»

«And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein; / And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.»

«Also when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer. (Lamentations 3:8)»

«And they came to the threshingfloor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation: and he made a mourning for his father seven days.»

«And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and over Jonathan his son: / (Also he bade them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow: behold, it is written in the book of Jasher.) / The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! / Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.»

«And Jeremiah lamented for Josiah: and all the singing men and the singing women spake of Josiah in their lamentations to this day, and made them an ordinance in Israel: and, behold, they are written in the lamentations.»

«Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life.»

«But everything that may some day be possible to many the solitary man can now prepare and build with his hands, that err less. Therefore, dear sir, love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you. And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very large; rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand. Seek yourself some sort of simple and loyal community with them, which need not necessarily change as you yourself become different and again different; love in them life in an unfamiliar form and be considerate of aging people, who fear that being-alone in which you trust.»

«Every man may be observed to have a certain strain of lamentation, some peculiar theme of complaint on which he dwells in his moments of dejection»