Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

51 quotes in 787 categories

• I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious…
• One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be…
• If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
• The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.
• Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.
• Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.
• Much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner…
• A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.
• Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or…
• 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 feel,…
• And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.
• But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.
• 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.
• I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.
• I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.
• I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.
• Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.
• Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.
• Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.
• My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

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