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

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.

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?

Among my stillness was a pounding heart.

We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

The English are busy folk; they have no time in which to be polite.

Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually.

We have to choose to slow down, to actually see the time and space that we are in. To truly see people and accept them in their priceless moments.

Hence, loathèd Melancholy, Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn, 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.

It doesn't matter how rich you are - you know when you're being ripped off.

No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well.

Once you start to listen to your voice, you start to feel the power in that.