I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.

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.

At a certain age you're always uncertain how other people will take you.

Everyone is a son or daughter of god.

If you can trust God to save you for eternity, you can trust him to lead you for a lifetime.

[I]f you want instant, reflexive support for the US government's police and military powers, MSNBC is the place to turn these days.

I don't know when I made that active decision to be a writer or to try to write, but I know I always liked storytelling.

I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.

I don't speak Spanish, I speak a little of Italian but no Spanish.

Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?

We might be too proud to admit it as guys, but we still need to learn how to manage responsibility, how to face our challenges.