He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

Of course my flesh reaches for the earth. That is where it belongs.

But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.

This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.

“Tell me,” he said, “who gives better offerings, a miserable man or a happy one?” “A happy one, of course.” “Wrong,” he said. “A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-whit

That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.