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

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

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?

The past never leaves you. You carry it around with you for as long as you live, like a pale, stubborn worm lodged there in your gut, keeping you up at night.

We are at that age that balances between independence and conferring with your friends about every miniscule decision you make. I've never liked that part of adolescence.

He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.

The need for connection and community is primal, as fundamental as the need for air, water, and food.

When God brings all things to light, you will discover just how significant you've been in God's plan.

I think I need to face what I could have been in order to understand and accept what I am.

When I sing for myself, I probably sing for anyone who has any kind of hurt, any kind of bad feelings, good feelings, ups and downs, highs and lows, that kind of thing.

Inflation hasn't ruined everything. A dime can still be used as a screwdriver.

Well it's not easy being Tiger Woods on the course. It's not easy being Tiger Woods off the course. In his defense, it's not easy being Tiger Woods.

It means so much to be European champion again with a personal best and I couldn’t have asked for anything more.