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

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.

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?

They would not find me changed from him they knew — Only more sure of all I thought was true.

I am nobody, even if I say I am this or that.

You're kind of... distracting.Am I?Yes. In the best way.

When a Father takes the child by the hand, he takes the Mother by the Heart.... The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

Trust is greater than love.

If you leave me here," the guy on the floor said, "he'll kill me tomorrow morning." Parker looked at him. "So you've still got tonight," he said.

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

If you take risks, you may fail; but if you don't take risks, you will surely fail

Certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as 'common sense' has never produced anything worth celebrating.

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.