I loved growing up in a little town. I loved knowing people. I loved going to the store and running into people. I loved going into the store and having forgotten my bag, saying, 'Charge it, put it on my bill.' I loved going to the gas station and saying, 'Pete, fill it up.' I loved that continuity of life.

I hated country music growing up, but it gets in your bone marrow, kind of like a disease.

Texas is so big, and the place where I grew up was so little, and I was such a little thing growing up in the middle of it. I had two choices: I could either spend my life feeling insignificant, or I could look on the life I lived as a microcosm of the universe.

Jingle taps on the majorette boots were an important part of a little girl growing up in the South.

People in grief need someone to walk with them without judging them.

Death is the one - the one thing we don't have many answers for. We understand how people die, but we don't know what comes next, and that's something that's always fascinated and disturbed me and frustrated me.

Joy of living is sustainable; fear of dying is not.

I understood Stephen's point of view because if you had been given a death sentence at the age of 21, would you find it easy to believe in a loving God? Also, Stephen's work was taking him into the depths of the universe, and it was, I thought, fairly understandable that there wasn't much room for God in his equations.