Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

This is not to say I don’t feel my own grief, which can hit powerfully at unexpected times. It’s just that the telling does not automatically bring on my own upset, as people assume. I deal more with their reaction than they do with mine, and so you have to choose your timing.

I was struck after 9/11 by what seemed the assumption that everyone bereaved by that event was suffering the same thing. I wanted to explore how individual grief is, how complicated, how colored by the complexity of the mourner's relationship with the person who's died.

People handle stress in different ways.

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

I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.

No one can tell you what to expect or can offer a guide to grief. Because every relationship is so unique, no two people grieve the same way. And you have no idea how you are going to grieve till you are grieving.

Sometimes it takes certain people longer to get over things than others.

I try to be an active griever. I feel like we lean on time because of the trope 'Time heals all wounds.' And there is truth to that, but I don't think that it's absolute. I think that to grieve and to deal and cope, you have to be actively processing the information. Have your moments, be broken, and allow yourself to fully express pain.

You can be experiencing the worst, most gut-wrenching grief and still laugh or feel something positive or even fall in love, and it doesn't diminish the depth and sincerity of your grief.

The indulgence in grief is a blunder.

Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status.

A lot of people go straight from denial to despair without pausing in the middle and doing something about it.

Some people seem so different, some people feel so much more than other people, some people are able to push past things so much easier. And...it's just fascinating to me.

Grief comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. I think one of the lessons of this for me is that there's no one way to grieve. Everyone does it in their own way, in their own time, and we all process life and its challenges and its ups and downs as they come.

How families deal with loss, everyone has their own process.

What it boils down to is that each person has his own ways of coping with trauma and grief, with the pain of life, and astrology was one of mine. Don't criticize me, I wanted to say, until you have stood in my place. This helped me. Nobody was hurt by it.

I don't think anybody deals well with tragedy or grief, but maybe my characters are particularly bad at it. Which is why I love them.

He'd lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.

Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy

In days that follow, I discover that anger is easier to handle than grief.

A lot of people ask me about my father's passing when I was young, which I'm never comfortable with. I invariably move around that subject.

I feel like people are actually just built differently, have different chemicals going on in their goddamn brain.

There's no default. Each emotional experience elicits a different, possibly new response.

One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.