Meghan O'Rourke quote: "Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss."

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.
MEGHAN O'ROURKE

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.
MEGHAN O'ROURKE

Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
P.J. O'ROURKE

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to t...
P.J. O'ROURKE

People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they're doing, or how their hair looks. Nobo...
ERICA O'ROURKE

A hat should be taken off when greeting a lady, and left off the rest of your life. Nothing looks mo...
P.J. O'ROURKE

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When ...
P.J. O'ROURKE

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
P.J. O'ROURKE

I have been told by the third grade teacher that my daughter Poppet is reading at middle school leve...
P.J. O'ROURKE

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source o...
P.J. O'ROURKE

The average IQ in America is—and this can be proven mathematically—average.
P.J. O'ROURKE

It's not only the demons who have the power to break you. It's the small, unexpected kindness, the f...
ERICA O'ROURKE

The proper behaviour all through the holiday season is to be drunk. The drunkenness culminates on Ne...
P.J. O'ROURKE

I met his eyes. Unlike Callie, he wouldn't be fooled with a smile. Once you've glimpsed something's ...
ERICA O'ROURKE

Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.
P.J. O'ROURKE

Given a choice, it seems like pity would be easier to bear than mockery, but that's not true. Mocker...
ERICA O'ROURKE

We had a choice between Democrats who couldn't learn from the past and Republicans who couldn't stop...
P.J. O'ROURKE

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove t...
P.J. O'ROURKE

Now I really have it all. I've been given some bullshit in my time, but that....
TIM O'ROURKE

I have to convince other Democrats and Republicans that it's wise to invest in the U.S.-Mexico b...
BETO O'ROURKE

In terms of immigration, we're seeing a lot of Democrats and Republicans use the really elastic ...
BETO O'ROURKE

Juarez had become a failed city. The mayor of Juarez lived in El Paso. Not only did he not live in h...
BETO O'ROURKE

El Paso in many ways is the Ellis Island for Mexico and much of Latin America.
BETO O'ROURKE

I'm for the DREAM Act. It makes so much sense. Following the implementation of the DREAM Act, we...
BETO O'ROURKE

Part of the job for me and others from El Paso who live along the border is to dispel the myths abou...
BETO O'ROURKE

We in El Paso and Juarez are literally one community. There's no separation; there's no DMZ;...
BETO O'ROURKE

PJ's suggested chant, for pointless protest marches:

"Five, four, three, two.
We don...
P.J. O'ROURKE

I have a St. Bernard named B.
HEATHER O'ROURKE

The raw and natural sounds of Aero music don't subtract from it's beauty, instead it creates a rich ...
JIM O'ROURKE

It wasn't the "I love you" she heard that made her let him go. It was the "Come with me" that she di...
MEGHAN O'CONNOR

In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's differ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in...
P. J. O'ROURKE

I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove t...
P. J. O'ROURKE

I am one and when I am one I am none, and when I am none I have won.
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive a...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

I suppose we all have our little hiding-hole if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whol...
FRANK O'CONNOR

They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy...
TIM O'BRIEN

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers...
ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY

Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I ...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

Virtue should always be colmingled with humor.
PATRICK O'BRIAN

One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silenc...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

[H]iding how you really feel and trying to make everyone happy doesn't make you nice, it just makes ...
JENNY O'CONNELL

Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - t...
SEáN O'CASEY

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church t...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Chris...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.
ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY

You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You...
STEWART O'NAN

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
SEáN O'CASEY

Gabrielle chuckled, her dark eyes twinkling. “So he’s been after you, has he? Poor Etta, pursued...
MICHELLE O'LEARY

She paused and saw him tense in expectation. He wouldn’t like to hear this, but better from her th...
MICHELLE O'LEARY

I’m not bipolar, I’ve just had a bipolar life foisted upon me.
DANIEL O'MALLEY

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the tr...
TIM O'BRIEN

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.
LOUISE O'NEILL

I found him perhaps the least terrifying man I've ever met in the theater—because at first glance ...
PETER O'TOOLE

Happiness arises from getting what you want, and this comes and goes. Joy arises from being with wha...
MARY O'MALLEY

It's not the face, but the expressions on it. It's not the voice but the things you say. It's not th...
IAN O'SHEA

You couldn’t relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. Y...
STEWART O'NAN

They should."

"Should be like a wood bee," she said.

It was a private joke, a ...
STEWART O'NAN

The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?
STEWART O'NAN

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't s...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a const...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

You never loved me, Farin. You never even said you liked me very much.
HEATHER O'BRIEN

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween cand...
HEATHER O'NEILL

Don't stand unmoving outside the door of a crying baby whose only desire is to touch you. Go to your...
PEGGY O'MARA

Marry for love. But also choose to marry a man or woman who you love that treats you with the ultima...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR

There will be a time when love is beautiful and passionate and nothing else will exist but you and t...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed w...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

[I suspect] that in the drive toward the liberal universalist notion of human rights that characteri...
DARREN O'DONNELL

All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and hon...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

If you are different from the rest of the flock, they bite you
VINCENT O'SULLIVAN

I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of t...
TIM O'BRIEN

We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

To love without ownership, to love with total trust and faith in that very love, to love with the sa...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR

My feeling on the subject of sex with a man is - don't give it up unless you're willing to give him ...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR

Life is surreal. When you step back and really take a look at it, the irony is absolute.
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR

Ladies, you have a ton of power if you just understand the fundamental differences between men and w...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR

When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
SEáN O'CASEY

Well, I'm not sure where this puts me, Sire. I mean, at least with the others I know what's expected...
AMIE O'BRIEN

You cannot borrow half of who you are from someone else, yet people try to do it all of the time, th...
JENNIFER O'NEILL

For Equilibrium, a Blessing:
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Sometimes, when people speak, I cease listening to their words and zoom in instead on the cadence, a...
ROSIE O'DONNELL

Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country.
FLANN O'BRIEN

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
EDNA O'BRIEN

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or ...
EUGENE O'NEILL

It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of sh...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Your noble friend will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.
JOHN O'DONOHUE

If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortio...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Beauty is the illumination of your soul.
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship i...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you....
JOHN O'DONOHUE

No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself; you are its custodian and entr...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it w...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Every friendship travels at sometime through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

All you can ever achieve is a sense of your soul. You gain little glimpses of its light, colors, and...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

You are as young as you feel. If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul, there will be a youthful...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.
JOHN O'DONOHUE

You are like nobody since I love you"
-Pablo Neruda

This art of love discloses the ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuri...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

If you try to avoid or remove the awkward quality, it will pursue you. The only effective way to sti...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

The heart is the inner face of your life. The human journey strives to make this inner face beautifu...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Inspiration is always a surprising visitor.
JOHN O'DONOHUE

you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care...
TIM O'BRIEN

It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and dange...
TIM O'BRIEN

...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe...
TIM O'BRIEN

But this too is true: stories can save us.
TIM O'BRIEN

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of th...
TIM O'BRIEN

The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.
NUALA O'FAOLAIN

There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrib...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across...
MARK O'CONNELL

It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore...
EDNA O'BRIEN

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

And although in many cases these unions proved happy enough, sailors being excellent husbands, often...
PATRICK O'BRIAN

Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

I write to discover what I know.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I s...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

My body is not my own any more. They have stamped their names all over it.
LOUISE O'NEILL

The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling; a beauty different from t...
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Then Dad started going on about the complex geological formations in this part of the coast until Mu...
KERRIE O'CONNOR

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biar...
FRANK O'HARA

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay....
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It wou...
STEWART O'NAN

I would not hurt you, little man,' he said.

'I think that I got the disorder in Mullingar...
FLANN O'BRIEN

Fame stole my yellow. Yellow is the color you get when you're real and brutally honest. Yellow is wi...
ROSIE O'DONNELL

Grace changes us and change is painful".
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is t...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an arti...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at...
EUGENE O'NEILL

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
FRANK O'HARA

Stand up, be counted. We have the numbers.
BILL O'REILLY

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the r...
STEWART O'NAN

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in ...
STEWART O'NAN

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers w...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

She hated her job the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hat...
TAWNI O'DELL

Romance and romantic are different. Death, itself, can be romantic. Nature and a destructive snowsto...
R.B. O'BRIEN

The robot successfully dismounted the car, proceeding at a slight crouch, and with exaggerated cauti...
MARK O'CONNELL

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the i...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way... things I had n...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a si...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

Don’t tell me my writing is misogynistic or anti-feminist just because I or my heroines like to be...
R.B. O'BRIEN

That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," a...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR

When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You co...
TIM O'BRIEN

The rocking of the boat by the waves was soothing but unknown. The men on the shore were asleep. Not...
JOSEPH O'NEILL

When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered.
JOHN O'DONOHUE

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.
TIM O'BRIEN

There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get.... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a ...
STEWART O'NAN

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate those ...
TIM O'BRIEN

It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero.
TIM O'BRIEN

Experience has taught me that what you love, you should love all the harder because someday it will ...
RONAN O'BRIEN

Rising up into the air, they took to the sky and flew. From west and beyond west, into the wind and ...
PAT O'SHEA

You're the fire burning inside of me.
KELVIN O'RALPH

I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony. I do not crave security. I wis...
PETER O'TOOLE

I guess relationships are just funny like that. It's impossible to figure out why some work out and ...
JENNY O'CONNELL

If you work really hard, and you're kind, amazing things will happen.
CONAN O'BRIEN

Lasting healing comes from being curious rather than controlling, from mercy rather than manipulatio...
MARY O'MALLEY

What the hell is that?" he asked.
"Magic mushrooms."
"I've always wanted to try those," he...
HEATHER O'NEILL

I've always been a pretty good researcher," said Bronwyn modestly.
Oh, so that we sha...
DANIEL O'MALLEY

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

Meghan O'Rourke

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