There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.

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.

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.

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

I'm happy being myself, which I've never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn't have those things in mine.

I think it would be better if nobody owned anything, but they didn't starve. Had enough paint and enough pianos and everything else.

Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being.

The love of God invades me, the peace of God pervades me, the will of God persuades me, and I am wholly His.

A Temple is one of the best ways of benefiting other living beings - it is the best form of public service.

Love life's weariness leavens.

There are situations in which hope and fear run together, in which they mutually destroy one another and lose themselves in dull indifference.

When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages; but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion.

But our trials need not be spiritually fatal. They need not take us from our covenants or from the household of God.

Plotinus thought that the entire world has a single soul. He also thought that each animal and plant and of course human, has an individual soul.