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

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.

... 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?

So you're saying your kissing me back was just a pity thing? Because it sure didn't feel that way to me.

The early lion gets the best game.

Nothing is so envied as genius, nothing so hopeless of attainment by labor alone. Though labor always accompanies the greatest genius, without the intellectual gift labor alone will do little.

Good manners are the techniques of expressing consideration for the feelings of others.

I'm kind of sad and happy all the time. Just kind of like feeling, you know, full of life and confident, and at the same time terrified. I'm all of those things at once.

He's a bootlegger....One time he killed a man who found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.

We are living like brothers, Christians and Muslims. Also the Jews lived in peace with us before the occupation began.

I deserve to have boundaries, and my boundaries are respected. I love and honor myself. I am safe. All is well.

For the robust, an error is information.

Everybody's not going to like jazz, let's just be honest about it. Everybody doesn't like everything. There's a disconnect in generations and some people just aren't going to feel that music.