Quotes by Meghan O'rourke - Page 2

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 / Poet
Crosses
Eye
Fleeting
Lovely
Luminous
Mother
Spring
Cardinal
Edge
Every Day
Thoughts
She
Startling
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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 / Poet
Entry
Mother
Sky
Unimaginable
Wake Up
Waking
Life World Your
Divide
Shell
Waking Up
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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 / Poet
Fall
Female
Spending
Talking
Vulnerability
Worry
Celebrating
Trap
Worrying
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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 / Poet
Aspect
Consoling
Different
Faces
Loss
Loved Ones
Recognition
Anyone Else
None
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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 / Poet
Alive
Loss
Lost Ones
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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 / Poet
Loss
Past
Self
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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 / Poet
Designation
Devoted
Each Day
Envy
Ritual
Support
Jewish
Conceived
Group
Perfectly
Remembering
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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 / Poet
Christmas
Breathing
Cancer
Christmas Day
Clock
Died
Mother
Exact
None
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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 / Poet
Dog
Dog Food
Grief
Memories
Moon
Notes
Sunlight
Tears
Wave
Bringing
Flick
Inner
Memory
Sleeper
Switch
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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 / Poet
Flu
Grief
Linear
Prepared
Sadness
Unpredictable
Worst
Days
Getting
Fact
Somehow
Steadily
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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 / Poet
Bruised
Faces
Fathom
Grief
Mourn
Over You
Strangeness
Taboo
Wonder
Descend
Deepest
Somehow
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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 / Poet
Relationship
Identity
Letting Go
Loss
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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 / Poet
Grief
Reality
Spiritual
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Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.
Meghan O'rourke / Poet
Chaos
Drama
Friendly
Grief
Intense
Loss
Moved On
Narrative
Static
Absorb
Appears
Easily
Dramas
Episodic
Internal
Largely
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I was not raised with religion, and I had no faith before my mother died. On the other hand, when she died, I did not immediately feel she was "gone." I don't believe she is in something like heaven, but I also feel that we don't understand much about the nature of the universe. So I hold on to that uncertainty, at times.
Meghan O'rourke / Poet
Believe
Hands
Mother
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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 / Poet
Desire
One Day
Stories
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One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.
Meghan O'rourke / Poet
Grief
Risk
Thinking
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While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.
Meghan O'rourke / Poet
Dream
Grief
Writing
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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 / Poet
Differences
Grief
Pain
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With ferocity and extraordinary craft, Lizzie Harris has made a book of poems that resonates far beyond the personal stories it tells. Stop Wanting reveals, in every lyric, its author's profound metaphorical gifts. In its ironies and intensities, it brings to mind a writer like the young Sylvia Plath, though what is startling about Harris' s work is the way it combines those gifts with a muted, deft self-awareness. Most of all, these are wonderfully shaped, powerful, and surprising poems-a startling debut.
Meghan O'rourke / Poet
Book
Powerful
Self
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Meghan O'rourke Quotes - Page 2

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