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

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.

The germ of creation lies in violence.

... nets, grids, and other types of calculus.

I'm a really huge fan of papaya juice.

Please not thyself the flattering crowd to hear; 'Tis fulsome stuff, to please thy itching ear. Survey thy soul, not what thou does appear, But what thou art.

People will suffer almost anything, as long as it means they don't have to change.

My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.

I've stayed in houses that were in the country, and in England, but I'm still not sure that I've stayed in an English country house.

I am and will remain the president of all Cameroonians without exception, and the great winner in these elections is democracy

Successful entrepreneurs don't wait for the perfect moment - they create it

There is an old saying: if a man comes home with sand in his cuffs and cockleburs in his pants, don't ask him what he shot.