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

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.

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.

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.