115 Quotes by Meghan O'Rourke

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.

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

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.

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

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.

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.

There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.

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

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.