Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

I believe God weeps over - over death. Jesus wept at the grave the Lazarus. In the Bible, Jesus weeps at death.

In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

It was despairing to find out that I am mortal.

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.

Despair is despair, sorrow is sorrow, death is death. It's not about who is experiencing it; it's about building a bridge of empathy across these experiences.

Dying is one of those things that can’t be fixed. Not by talking about it, not with all the brain surge in the world.

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

It’s odd, isn’t it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it’s a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you’re not alone.

ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee

I hope I am not too repetitive. However, coming to terms with death is part of the general human situation.

The body is the one thing you have to say goodbye to. You can hold on to your memories. You can hold on to the spirit. That's part of the package that you love and the part that comforts you.

I don't know if my work is a concerted effort to make kids sad! But life and death go hand in hand. It's our condition as human beings.

I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.

You get to an age when you lose people close to you.

Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

We all have two things in common, no matter who we are: We were born and we are going to die.

Americans in the Civil War period were very interested in Heaven and what it might be like, because they were having to face the fact that many of their loved ones were gone and many of their loved ones, they hoped, were in this other realm called Heaven.

We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love, especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on, we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them, held their hand, looked in their eyes, been there.

None of us, in our culture of comfort, know how to prepare ourselves for dying, but that's what we should do every day. Every single day, we die a thousand deaths.

I don't mourn the dead. I mourn the living.

Life is really pretty tricky, and there's a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn't live without.

For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear.

For those of us who have lost loved ones in their prime - as I did when my father and other relatives succumbed - even one of those years would have been a precious gift.