Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

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.

There is nothing better than love, kindness and forgiveness to create enduring peace.

Start before you're ready.

Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.

In all, Nigeria belongs to us all and we have a personal responsibility to see that it succeeds

Breathing is underrated.

So the criminals win, that's what you're saying? For now they do. But it's a long game, Jamison. And I always play for the long game.

The main thing about the word jazz, is that it's very limiting to what people are doing.

As we hate ourselves less, we tend to hate other people less too.

In the theater, you go from point A to point Z, building your performance as the evening progresses. You have to relinquish that control on a film.

We've all been broken at some point. Forgiving ourselves or another person helps us move forward.