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1 " A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud. "
― Philippe Ariès , Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present
2 " Too evident sorrow does not inspire pity but repugnance, it is the sign of mental instability or of bad manners: it is morbid. "
3 " An acceptable death is a death which can be accepted or tolerated by the survivors. It has its antithesis: ‘the embarrassingly graceless dying,’ which embarrasses the survivors because it causes too strong an emotion to burst forth; and emotions must be avoided both in the hospital and everywhere in society. One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private, that is to say, secretly. "
4 " Indeed, in the majority of cases the dying person has already lost consciousness. Death had been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped. All these little silent deaths have replaced and erased the great dramatic act of death, and no one any longer has the strength or patience to wait over a period of weeks for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning. "
5 " ..если какой-нибудь свободный человек схватит свободную женщину за кисть руки, он должен будет заплатить 15 солидов; за руку ниже локтя - 30; выше локтя - 35; и, наконец, если он доберётся до груди - 45 солидов "
― Philippe Ariès , A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
6 " These people no doubt became more common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and judging from La Fontaine, those who tried to cheat death were found primarily among the old: He who most resembles the dead is the most reluctant to die. Eighteenth-century "
― Philippe Ariès , The Hour of Our Death
7 " An Italian text from 1490 shows how spontaneous and natural was the clear recognition of imminent death, and how fundamentally alien to the miraculous or to Christian piety. We are now in a psychological climate very remote from that of the chansons de geste: a commercial town of the Renaissance. In Spoleto there lived a pretty girl, young and flirtatious, very much attached to the pleasures of her youth. Suddenly she is struck down by illness. Will she cling to life, unaware of the fate that awaits her? Today any other reaction would seem cruel and monstrous, and the family, the doctor, and the priest would conspire to maintain her illusion. But this young girl of the fifteenth century immediately understands that she is going to die. She sees that death is near: “Cum cerneret, infelix juvencula, de proximo sibi imminere mortem.” She rebels, but her rebellion does not take the form of refusing to accept her death—that does not occur to her—but of defying God. She has herself dressed in her finest clothes, as if for her wedding day, and she gives herself to the devil.7 Like the sacristan of Narbonne, the young girl of Spoleto knew. Sometimes "
