Meghan O'Rourke Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke -
“My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke -
“Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke -
“A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke -
“I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke -
“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 -
“One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke -
“Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke -
“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 -
“If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke -
“Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke -
“What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.”
-- Meghan O'Rourke
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