A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.

Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other.

There's no easy way to do this. So do it right: weep, laugh, watch, pray, love, live, give thanks and praise; comfort, mend, honor, and remember.

Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments.

I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.

I'm lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I'll make the effort.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

... by doing you shall know What it is you have to do.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm's way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things?

Vulnerability is the least celebrated emotion in our society

Backstory is like a flavour you can’t quite pick, lurking in the layers of a curry. You know it’s there and it enhances the flavour, but it’s intangible and fleeting. Use it sparingly!

He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it." Pope Alexander

There is no way to love, love is the way of life.

He was religious, but had refrained from allowing his religious ideals to be obscured by a god.

The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.

The press gave me a voice too quickly, and that could have unsettled a man who had every right to feel he should be in control of the thing he had created.

Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.

In response to the question, 'How do you know when you're finished?' Pollock replied, 'How do you know when you're finished making love?

I have never read it. You should not waste your time.