For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.

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.

I will Basquiat the canvas of your body like a Broadway Junction wall…and Gordon Parks you for those dark midnights when your scent fades.

The lonely, wistful revisionism of memories is as gratingly repetitive as snow and ice in Canada. I avoid them both at all costs - memories and Canada.

Sometimes, it is an external force that makes you realize your real potential.

Leaving Australia was the hardest thing I have ever done.

I love, love, love music - have since I was a kid, and I'm still really into music - and I became a singer because I was too stupid to learn how to play an instrument, I guess.

We were all worried that nothing good was going to happen for Florida

If you stand for peace in the USA, you're lucky to be alive.

You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

True Blood' is amazing. I have to give a shout out to 'Melrose Place' because I do watch. I love 'Entourage.' One of my favorite shows back in the day was 'Friday Night Lights.