Top 80 Meghan O'Rourke Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes you don’t even know what you want until you find out you can’t have it.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

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

— Meghan O'Rourke

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

11. “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

12. “I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn’t, necessarily.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

19. “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

20. “A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

21. “Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

22. “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

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

— Meghan O'Rourke

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “When we are learning the world, we know things we cannot say how we know. When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of a loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

28. “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

29. “A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

30. “I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

31. “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

32. “If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

33. “Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death – more than they experience, say, denial.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

34. “And after my mother’s death I became more open to and empathetic about other people’s struggles and losses.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

35. “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

36. “Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

37. “But now it seemed to me that Hamlet was moody and irascible in no small part because he is grieving: his father has just died. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the days while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

38. “There is always tension in women’s gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

39. “But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

40. “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

41. “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

42. “Loss doesn’t feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

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

— Meghan O'Rourke

44. “I was stunned by the way my mother’s body was being taken to pieces, how each new week brought a new failure, how surreal the disintegration of a body was.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

45. “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

46. “In the months that followed my mother’s death, I managed to look like a normal person. I walked the street; I answered my phone; I brushed my teeth; most of the time. But I was not OK. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. Dishes piled in the sink, knives crusted with strawberry jam. At one point I did not wash my hair for ten days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of everyday.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

47. “For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don’t think it is HELPING people mourn.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

48. “Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on, it’s accompanied by a whole host of other feelings.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

49. “This is where we die, I thought, stripped of any fleck of the festive. Dying is bureaucratic and fluorescent.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

50. “Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.”

— Meghan O'Rourke