The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

Anyone who dials a phone while driving is flirting with death. And anyone who texts while driving is insane.

Death is the final wake-up call.

Acceptance is the better part of grief.

I have watched Muslims chant 'Death to America!' on the streets of Tehran, then privately beg me to help them get a visa to the United States.