Top 41 Quotes by 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.

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

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

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

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.

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.

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

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

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.

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