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.

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.

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.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

I'm not into appearances. I like flaws, I think they make things interesting.

Beware of anything that would tarnish God's mirror in you. It is always something good stains it—good, but not best.

With wrong farming methods, we turn fertile land into desert. Unless we go back to organic farming and save the soil, there is no future.

Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness, in the other world, as I possibly can.

I can't play Mahatma Gandhi.

Actors don't generally go asking other actors for advice too much, but I'll take suggestions wherever I can.

Greatness is a journey that begins with the impossible and turns in to the unforgettable.

More harm is done by fools through foolishness than is done by evil-doers through wickedness.

Try to acquire the virtues you believe lacking in your brothers. Then you will no longer see their defects, for you will no longer have them yourself.

Instead of being a person to whom things happened, I became a person who made things happen.