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

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.

Let us not be bored

I write to raise the curtain on life's endless possibilities. Because you asked, "Pourquoi?

Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money.

I get a lot of my inspiration from my family, but I never got to meet my dad's dad.

The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.

I'm prepared for 12 rounds. I'll be very happy with anything else, but I'm prepared for 12 or 15 rounds.

When two people - regardless of gender - long to care for each other, to protect each other, to treasure each other, we should do everything we can to foster that.

Sympathy can be addictive and can kill strong men as surely as a diet of nothing but sugar.

Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life.

Elvis makes millions every year, although he's been dead for many years.