Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

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

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

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.

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.

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.

The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

To know that one has never really tried - that is the only death.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

When you break up, your whole identity is shattered. It's like death.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Death comes not to the living soul, nor age to the loving heart.

Death is a distant rumor to the young.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

I don't sit in the corner waiting for death: death has to pursue me. I'm going strong. I hope to reach 100 and ask for an extension, just like my grandmother did.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

I'm Irish. I think about death all the time.

I don't fear death because I don't fear anything I don't understand. When I start to think about it, I order a massage and it goes away.

The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.

Death doesn't frighten me; now I can think peacefully of ending a long life.

Death comes for us all. Even for kings he comes.

In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character.

It has ever been since time began, and ever will be, till time lose breath, that love is a mood - no more - to man, and love to a woman is life or death.

Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is.

In Goddess religion death is not feared, but is understood to be a part of life, followed by birth and renewal.

Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven.

Most of the debate over the cultures of death and life is about process. The debate focuses on the technology available to determine how we prolong life and how and when we end it.

I think that the core doctrines of Christianity - the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death-these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.

When I see someone who is starved, they don't look alert. They don't have boundless energy. If you're too skinny, it looks like you're near death.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

Early this morning, I signed my death warrant.

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.

I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity.

If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn't worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality. And to me, sailing the open ocean is a real challenge, because it's life or death.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics.

It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune.

If I ever completely lost my nervousness I would be frightened half to death.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.