Top 80 Meghan O'Rourke Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

53. “Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

54. “After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

55. “Be patient with yourself. Don’t make the loss harder by thinking you should be a certain way, or have bounced back, etc.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

56. “My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

57. “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

58. “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

59. “My theory is this: Women falter when they’re called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they’re called on to enact them.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

60. “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

61. “Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

62. “I’m not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

63. “The emotional journey has been as hard as the physical one. The fear I feel, in combination with busy doctors who don’t have time to listen, has really affected me.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

64. “Many Americans don’t mourn in public anymore – we don’t wear black, we don’t beat our chests and wail.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

65. “This seems like one of the hardest things about being sick in the way you’re sick: being sick makes you stressed. But being stressed makes you sicker.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

66. “It is unbearable – and yet I bear it.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

67. “The more I talked to sick people. the more I found that what is most disturbing for many of is is that grace has become a kind of moral requirement in sickness: If you must be ill, at least be improved by your illness. And yet conditions under which grace can emerge may not be present.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

68. “Ethical loneliness is what happens when wrongs are compounded by going cruelly unacknowledged.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

69. “There is a razor-thin line between trying to find something usefully redemptive in illness and lying to ourselves about the nature of suffering. Until we mourn what is lost in illness – and until we have a medical community that takes seriously the suffering of patients – we should not celebrate what is gained in it.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

70. “Only a few friends realized at the time how much physical suffering I was undergoing. We are bad at recognizing the suffering of others unless we are given clear-cut clues and evidence. And so invisible illnesses often go unacknowledged, while less serious conditions get attention.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

71. “I know many people who are suspicious of diagnoses – they think of them as labels that reduce or stigmatize. I knew, already, that a diagnosis was not going to answer all my questions. But I craved a diagnosis because it is a form of understanding.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

72. “As the surgeon Atul Gawande wrote of the medical profession, “Nothing is more threatening to who you think you are than a patient with a problem you cannot solve.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

73. “But the fatigue of physical dysfunction, I came to recognize, is as different from normal sleep deprivation as COVID-19 is from the common cold. It was not caused by needing sleep, I thought, but by my body’s cellular conviction that it needed to conserve energy in order to fix whatever was wrong. The feeling erased my will, the sense of identity that drives most of us. The worst part of my fatigue was the loss of an intact sense of self.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

74. “How to describe intermittent severe pain on the same scale as constant middle-range pain, which I found more debilitating?”

— Meghan O'Rourke

75. “I got used to being uncomfortable, and I internalized the idea that my mentioning my discomfort made me fussy – “The princess and the pea,” my mother once said, in irritation, making it clear that I was demanding too much when I complained.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

76. “The tendency in many parts of medicine is, if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, or the patient is cuckoo.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

77. “Americans’ embrace of the “natural approach” is a rebuke to the dominant social structures of our time – Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Tech. But in a crucial way it is also in thrall to one of the most powerful contemporary Western delusions: namely, the idea that we can control the outcomes of our lives, in this case through self-purification.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

78. “A doctor’s job, like a gambler’s, is intimately tied up with failure; the house always wins over time.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

79. “Like many in their baby boomer generation, they saw doctors as unquestionable experts. You didn’t go to them unless you had a high fever or a bad fall or a wound that needed stitching. In that case, you got a diagnosis, you took medicine or had surgery, and you got better, more or less in that order. But if the doctor told you nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong. My parents believed in the power of Western medicine, and therefore so did I.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

80. “The actual encounter was always confusing, eleven minutes of liminal contact in which I tried to conduct myself in a way that would make the doctor like me, in the hope they would take some true interest in my plight. But their day was full of tests to order, bureaucracy to cut through, an education that taught them not to say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you.” And so we stood together in a tiny antiseptic room, the doctor and patient, a world apart.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

81. “There is a loneliness to illness, a child’s desire to be pitied and seen. But it is precisely this recognition that is elusive. How can you explain and identify your condition if not one has any grasp of what it is you suffer from and the symptoms wax and wane? How do you describe a disease that’s not always there?”

— Meghan O'Rourke

82. “On my message boards a recurrent theme was having a partner who didn’t help, who didn’t get it, who even judged and blamed. Even partners who did help often couldn’t feel the wave of need engulfing the ill person. And my god, the need. It felt shameful to need other people so much.”

— Meghan O'Rourke

83. “After all, a terrible anxiety attends chronic illness. Over time, it becomes difficult to untangle the suffering from symptoms like pain from the suffering inflicted by the anxiety over the possibility of more pain, and worse outcomes, in the future. This does not mean that the illness is in the mind; rather, the mind – that machine for making meaning – makes endless meanings of its new state, which may themselves influence the experience.”

— Meghan O'Rourke