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

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.

We can't shame women for trying to be beautiful. That's so mean and unfair. But there's a part of me that thinks it's really sad, too. It's very complicated.

For me, self-gratification eventually took a backseat to trying to do something collaborative with other people, to trying to make something new.

However, there's no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

I played with fire, did counsel spurn, Made life my common stake; But never thought that fire would burn, O that a soul could ache.

My twin's not broken. He's ruined. Do you understand the difference? With broken maybe you can fix him. Ruined? All you can do is wait to bury him.

Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure.

Most man only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.

Let love steal in disguised as friendship.

Your feelings are cosmic communication! The good feelings mean, GOOD FOR YOU. The bad feelings are to get your attention so that you will change what you are focusing on.

Someone once said the fundamental reason we get married is because have a universal human need for a witness.