Public Private Quotes by Meghan O'Rourke

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

— Meghan O'Rourke

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.

— Meghan O'Rourke

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

— Meghan O'Rourke

There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got…

— Meghan O'Rourke

One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of…

— Meghan O'Rourke

This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large…

— Meghan O'Rourke

The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

— Meghan O'Rourke

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact…

— Meghan O'Rourke

Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.

— Meghan O'Rourke

I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the…

— Meghan O'Rourke

For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.

— Meghan O'Rourke

To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to…

— Meghan O'Rourke