The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.

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'd found my niche: cat-owning, stalker-y secretary. And I played the same part again and again and again.

A guy has to have the want-to. You don't just make plays by a mistake, by accident.

You can't have anything else to say: you've poured out every drop of what you know.

Art is not living. It is the use of living.

For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women's cosmic power.

Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.

We are not America. We are Afghanistan.

According to a new study, Botox injections can help back pain. So you see, that's why John Kerry had all that Botox - his back was killing him from all that flip-flopping on issues.

In any character I ever play, whether she's good or bad or whatever, my most important thing is heart.

Life is on the wire. The rest is just waiting.