A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall.

There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.

A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.

The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

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.

It's a blessing not to be alone in your grief but it's also painful to see your parents and siblings in pain.

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.

Nobody can bring you a change. You have to want to change.

Good health is not something we can buy. However, it can be an extremely valuable savings account.

When planning your wedding you make so many decisions: 'Do I want this fork or that fork?' But in the end people aren't going to remember what napkin holder you choose.

All religions are both harmful and untrue.

Altruism is innate, but it's not instinctual. Everybody's wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.

A standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happen.

Nothing that ever happens in life can take away the fact that I am me. So I have to go on being me.

We cannot overlook the importance of wild country as source of inspiration, to which we give expression in writing, in poetry, drawing and painting, in mountaineering, or in just being there.

Your future. It awaits only you, to live it and to write it. - Shaman's Crossing by Robin Hobb

Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.