Earned a bachelor's at 27, then an M.F.A. that is still completely unused and in mint condition, never taken out of the box.

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything...

From the beginning, through the middle years and up to the end: too bad, too bad, too bad.

That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.

The older I get the more I enjoy my childhood…! ~James A. Murphy

There is nothing in the path of life that we don't already know before we start. Nothing important is learned

it was like trying to see a shadow in the dark

They were young; time hadn't yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions...

this free - man's prison known as life.

To travel is to see the world as it is.

God's definition of what matters is pretty straightforward. He measures our lives by how we love.

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question:...

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else.

Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me... only he's an imbecile.

Pursuit of material gain is ultimately empty when measured against eternity;

She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with...

Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities.

The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn...

The fear is for what is still to be lost.