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. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
My mother never liked Mother’s Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn’t be expressed with a card. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One’s inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one’s public persona. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
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 Read Quote
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it’s less like stages and more like different states of feeling. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
One of the ideas I’ve clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
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 Read Quote
When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things – to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
