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

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

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.

I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.

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

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

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