Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Mother, Spring, Eye

  16 Copy quote

• 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, Sadness, Flu

  "Meghan O'Rourke: The Long Good-Bye". Interview with Jennifer Haupt, www.psychologytoday.com. April 26, 2011.

  15 Copy quote

• 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.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Dog, Memories, Grief

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Home, Years

  12 Copy quote

• One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Grief, Perspective, Sorrow

  "Ask the Author Live: Meghan O'Rourke on Grief". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. March 2, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

• All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Falling In Love, Stories, Love Story

  10 Copy quote

• Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Desire, One Day, Stories

  16 Copy quote

• A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Mother, World, Portal

  "Ask the Author Live: Meghan O'Rourke on Grief". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. March 2, 2011.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Want, Sometimes, What You Want

  5 Copy quote

• A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Mother, Stories

  "Story's end" by Meghan O'Rourke, www.newyorker.com. March 07, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Grief, Feelings, Different

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Goodbye, Ideas, Giving

  Meghan O'Rourke (2011). “The Long Goodbye: A Memoir”, p.93, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Loss, Past, Self

  "Ask the Author Live: Meghan O'Rourke on Grief". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. March 2, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Writing, World, Way

  4 Copy quote

• If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Grief, Transactions, Universal

  Meghan O'Rourke (2011). “The Long Goodbye: A Memoir”, p.41, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Fate, Thinking, Ideas

  "Ask the Author Live: Meghan O'Rourke on Grief". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. March 2, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less commercialized way to approach burial.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Stress, Funeral, Cost

  Source: www.newyorker.com

  4 Copy quote

• I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Religious, Children, Two

  Meghan O'Rourke (2011). “The Long Goodbye: A Memoir”, p.82, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Spiritual, Grief, Reality

  "Ask the Author Live: Meghan O'Rourke on Grief". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. March 2, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Needs, World

  4 Copy quote

• It's a blessing not to be alone in your grief but it's also painful to see your parents and siblings in pain.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Pain, Sibling, Grief

  "Ask the Author Live: Meghan O'Rourke on Grief". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. March 2, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Envy, Support, Each Day

  4 Copy quote

• There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Gymnastics, Grace, Athleticism

  9 Copy quote

• 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 when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Loss, Lost Ones, Alive

  Meghan O'Rourke (2011). “The Long Goodbye: A Memoir”, p.140, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Thinking, Sick

  "Meghan O'Rourke: The Long Good-Bye". Interview with Jennifer Haupt, www.psychologytoday.com. April 26, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

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