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" I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious. "
Meghan O'Rourke
I Am
Child
Religious
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" Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Mother
Me
Like
" This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Piece
Grief
You
" A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Time
Say
Long
" 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 first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Grief
Better
Worst
" If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Universal
Exquisitely
Grief
" Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Us
Ship
Minds
" One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Home
Mother
World
" 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, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Wonder
Face
Feel
" A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Her
Makes
Mother
" When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Sick
Remember
Think
" But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone. "
Meghan O'Rourke
End
Say
People
" I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Like
Role
Spirit
" What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Thinking
Way
Women
" 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 designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Saying
Day
Support
" Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Beat
Wear
Black
" 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
Experience
Disruption
Grief
" Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world. "
Meghan O'Rourke
World
Always
Been
" My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Day
Mother
Know
" 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 them. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Women
Self-Conscious
Talents
" Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Television
Never
Loss
" My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Deep
Holiday
She
" The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Experience
Truth Is
Truth
" A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Life
Mother
She
" I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Thoughts
Day
Mother
" My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures. "
Meghan O'Rourke
History
Understanding
Life
" I believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection - wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is not just mine but ours. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Feel
Sadness
Myself
" Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Die
Loss
She
" 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
Much
Like
More
" I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist. "
Meghan O'Rourke
I Am
Information
Live
" Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Loss
Once
Paradoxical