We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.

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.

No need to feel guilty if you can't be a good man all the time. But anytime your heart is feeling so eager to do even a small good deed, then it might be a good chance for you…to be a better man.

He believes that people have destroyed religion and religion has destroyed people. He says he believes in God, but he doesn't believe in people.

Everything-everything-was communicated through the sound of the music. There were no other signals of any kind ever-no count-offs, head nods, spoken instructions...nothing.

Success comes when people act together; failure tends to happen alone.

I'm inspired by that rawness in very direct communication. My work is not meant to keep people happy or give them an escape.

I’ll see you in your dreams, okay, stupid?

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

Power obeys reality, and not appearances; power is according to quality, and not quantity.

If it is strength, go down into hell and get hold of it!

It's fun to talk about heaven, about the throne of God and Jesus and Pop and the daughter we thought we had lost but will meet again someday. But it's not fun to talk about how we got there.