Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

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.

Your lifestyle should reflect your passion

Adequate photographers use their sight, good photographers use their senses, and great photographers use their souls.

The force fields of nature are force fields of consciousness. They are force fields of knowledge.

Make your mistakes work for you by learning from them.

There is a lot of difference between failure and defeat. Failure is when you are defeated and neither learn nor contribute anything.

Arbor Day is not like other holidays. Each of those reposes on the past, while Arbor Day proposes for the future.

Failure can get to be a rather comfortable old friend.

I had always loved comedy, and acted out Steve Martin and Bill Cosby albums with my sister for my parents on road trips and stuff, and I loved to laugh and make people laugh.

It is contrary to our principles to multiply organizations, since, in all conscience, there are enough of them. And when organizations are created they need individuals to look after them.

To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.