Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

Sometimes writing it is a good way to understand something.

I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.

Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.

The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn't otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.

When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

I look at you and I write down what I hear.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

I'm here to make sense.

It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I have no message.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

For me, trying to articulate the world to help people see it in a way they haven't seen it before is hugely important. Sometimes, you have to take something that is completely inexplicable and say, 'Look, here is the beating heart of something you must understand.'

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.