Meghan O'Rourke quotes - page 2

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly. (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. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
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. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
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 at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes. View quote
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. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
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. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us. (Meghan O'Rourke)
One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
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. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. View quote
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 part of you is entirely subject to its demands. View quote
Meghan O'Rourke