Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

Grief is a very complicated monster. There's no real exorcising of it. It has a different form every day.

Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

To grieve is something extremely difficult, we don't even know how to begin to grieve, and I don't know how you can be taught to grieve.

My father's death, my move, and my frightening and difficult delivery created a tremendous amount of stress, pain, and sadness for me. I was practically devastated beyond recovery.

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.

There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness.

Them pains, when blues pains grab you, you'll sing the blues right.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

I feel a sense of sadness and joy. Mostly sadness though about what I've experienced and sadness about what others have experienced in reference to the stroke.

They say seven stages of grief. I think it's more like 77.

I feel like crying and sadness has brought an actual change to the shape of my mouth.

It can be frightening. I think, 'I don't want to go.' But I give myself room to grieve.

Grief, for me, is a moment-to-moment experience.

I cry sometimes. I get very upset.

Grief - the actual, natural process of it - doesn't have a schedule that I can work my life around.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

Oh baby," he whispers. Steps back. Out of the doorway. His face ashen. He walks slowly back to the kitchen. Leans over the counter. Puts his head in his hands. His hair falls over his fingers. The bathroom door clicks shut. She stays there for a long time. He's pulling his hair out.

Those who grieve find comfort in weeping and in arousing their sorrow until the body is too tired to bear the inner emotions.

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off ... Do not for ever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust.

Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours if it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static pain often is... is it not yet enough?

It’s been a full week since she left and all you’ve done is sulk like a dying cow. (Kish)

When you're in that state of grief, any little breeze, any hello, any confrontation, any grazing of someone meeting your eyes, might cause you suddenly to burst into grief. You could be looking at a jar of peanut butter in the supermarket, and then start crying.

This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.