“I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is t...” — Meghan O'Rourke Quote

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

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.

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

I'm not a Johnny-come-lately Jew. I've been around. I watch out for the Jews; I watch out for the Catholics.

An ignorance of Marx is as frequent among Marxists as an ignorance of Christ is among Catholics.

Most of the Catholics Christians I've met would for all practical purposes believe Jesus is God only, and we are human only. We missed the big point. The point is the integration, both in Jesus and ourselves.