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

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

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

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.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.