How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.