Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.

Meghan O'Rourke
The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

Meghan O'Rourke
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

Meghan O'Rourke
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 translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don't seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)

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.

Meghan O'Rourke
Although we have become more open about everything from incest to sex addiction, grief remains strangely taboo. In our culture of display, the sadness of death is largely silent.

Meghan O'Rourke
Time doesn't obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.

Meghan O'Rourke
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

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
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.

Meghan O'Rourke
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
A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.

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