One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

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.

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.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

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

Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less commercialized way to approach burial.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.