“Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.”

“We cry for ourselves, don't we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.”

“...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.”

“But I'm not dead!" Tereza cried. "I can still feel!""So can we," the corpses laughed.”

“It is a grave injustice to a child or adult to insist that they stop crying. One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary; but to humiliate a crying child is to increase his pain, and augment his rigidity. We stop other people from crying because we cannot stand the sounds and movements of their bodies. It threatens our own rigidity. It induces similar feelings in ourselves which we dare not express and it evokes a resonance in our own bodies which we resist.”

“Until I understood why you didn't cry, even though it hurt: there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.”