And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of the cards.

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

Desire can make anything into a god.

Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.

Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think we’d better look at what grief might offer us. It’s like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally.

It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.