Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less commercialized way to approach burial.

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 advice he reads in Ann Landers – good advice as long as you don’t need it, perfectly sensible as long as you don’t have any use for it.

I mean emotionally, women are like Bruce Lee and we’re like Donald Duck. An’ I think a lotta guys are afraid of that.

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

You never know the palette of the one you kill until the mind disgorges its finest colours.

I started when I was about 11, singing.

I recently bought a book of free verse. For twelve dollars.

I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

I'd auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and I didn't get a place and it was terrifying.