Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.

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.

While I was trying to write, I was trying to grow.

Take the fact that you were created to love. Your heart can find real joy only through love - through loving and being loved.

The sea, perhaps because of its saltiness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants' soul.

For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.

My dad never pushed me but the big thing is that he helped me by going out in the backyard and playing with me.

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.

I just want to be myself.

That is what fame is, isn't it? To get the world to fall in love with you.

There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.

Learning patience takes a lot of patience!