The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

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.

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.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.

This moment will never ever come back, so create a memory and hold it tight.

A positive attitude will elevate your energy and invigorate your tasks.

The sword of Gryffindor was hidden they knew not where, and they were three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead.

It is a fight from start to finish to be happy in God.

I imagined it. I wrote it. But I guess I never thought I'd see it.

Peace doesn't mean you won't have problems. It's means problems won't have you.

An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.

The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.

The purpose of life is to conjecture and prove.