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.

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.

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?

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.

LESS fabrication, MORE facilitation

We distance ourselves for protection, Wear scarves when it’s cold. What seems most outlandish in our autobiography Is what really happened.

War is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.

There are trappings of science fiction which I kind of embrace, but there are also cliches which I run from.

I think I just want to make and be part of great records, because of what it brings to other people, what it gives back, is so incredible.

A liar did ought to have a good memory.

A thousand trills and quivering sounds In airy circles o'er us fly, Till, wafted by a gentle breeze, They faint and languish by degrees, And at a distance die.

Don't try to make comparisons between your own pictures. Forget what you have done and think only of making the best of what you are doing.

Our bad luck is that our writing is linear, while we think circularly.