P.J. O'Rourke Quotes

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

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

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

It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength.

I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.

What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.

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

A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.

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.

Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.

But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.

Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.

And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.

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

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

This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.

For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.

There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

Be patient with yourself. Don't make the loss harder by thinking you should be a certain way, or have bounced back, etc.

Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.

Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on, it's accompanied by a whole host of other feelings.

I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn't, necessarily.

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.

A reputation is really hard to live down.

I couldn't direct traffic. It's hard enough just acting.

Women are much stronger than men. When a woman says enough is enough, which means enough is enough. Man will always lie at her feet in the hope of return. I was lying. And somehow happy.

Being out of work for 13 to 15 years is no walk in the park.

A lot of those who let you down are those who seemed the closest to you.

Acting was never my first choice as a profession, but I came to terms with it when I decided I better buckle down and be the best I can be at it.

I'm the worst surfer in California. My balance is off from boxing.

I wanted to change my name to Romeo Florentino. Romeo Florentino - that's a good fighter's name.

I never knew my father, and I'd hate to repeat that kind of cycle with my own children, because I'd also want to be there for them no matter what.

Boxers are very isolated - or isolated within their own camps.

I did think for many, many years that because of my ability I could beat the system. And I was wrong.

I don't care what Tom Cruise says about therapy.

In boxing, you don't know what's going to happen. In wrestling, it's already prearranged.

It was either therapy or die.

It's always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.

I started to shortcircuit because I had high aspirations for the film. I never told anybody that.

I think the first year and a half that I was in New York I was having trouble just living somewhere. Back in them days the city was a lot different than it is now.

Sometimes, when a man is alone, that's all you got is your dog.