The Long Goodbye Quotes

“Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you most.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“In the months that followed my mother's death, I managed to look like a normal person. I walked the street; I answered my phone; I brushed my teeth; most of the time. But I was not OK. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. Dishes piled in the sink, knives crusted with strawberry jam. At one point I did not wash my hair for ten days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of everyday.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“I heard a lot about the idea of dying "with dignity" while my mother was sick. It was only near her very end that I gave much thought to what this idea meant. I didn't actually feel it was undignified for my mother's body to fail--that was the human condition. Having to help my mother on and off the toilet was difficult, but it was natural. The real indignity, it seemed, was dying where no one cared for you the way your family did, dying where it was hard for your whole family to be with you and where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go. I didn't want that for my mother. I wanted her to be able to go home. I didn't want to pretend she wasn't going to die.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Waiting for appointments, for tests, for "procedures." And waiting, more broadly, for it--for the thing itself, for the other shoe to drop. Except in the waiting you keep forgetting that "it" will really happen--it's more like a threat, an anxiety: Will my love love me forever?”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“People do not want to confront the existential mess that is life. They want to check things off--OK, you're OK. And just because you can talk about your grief, you know," she said, looking sharply at me, "doesn't mean you are in control of it, or that you know what's going on. You are in the ocean. And what you think, what you analyze, that is just the descanting of that ocean. Your mind is an ocean and it has scary things in it. While you may be able to analyze your grief at three p.m., that has nothing to do with how you feel at three a.m., in the dark center of night.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“I was stunned by the way my mother's body was being taken to pieces, how each new week brought a new failure, how surreal the disintegration of a body was.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“But now it seemed to me that Hamlet was moody and irascible in no small part because he is grieving: his father has just died. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the days while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“This is where we die, I thought, stripped of any fleck of the festive. Dying is bureaucratic and fluorescent.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily, La Rochefoucauld wrote.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“I think: it's the holidays. There are parties. I'm young. I've spent the past two years going to oncologists. I'm going to put on my party shoes. And I do go to one party, and I leave when people start to dance around a pole. Later I start dating the man whose party it was, and he remembers being glad I came, and casually tells me how he flirted his head off that night. I'm not in your country, I think. I haven't lived in your country for a while.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye