“We carry the dead in our handsas we might carry water - with a careful,reverential tread.There is no other way.How easily, how easily their faces spill.”

“This is my formula for the fall of things:we come to a river we always knew we'd have to cross.It ferries the twilight down through fieldworksof corn and half-blown sunflowers.The only sounds, one lost cicada calling to itselfand the piping of a bird that will never have a name.Now tell me there is a pausewhere we know there should be an end;then tell me you too imagined it this waywith our shadows never quite touching the riverand the river never quite reaching the sea.”

“and the word lost for a single breath, as I lie against you; I promise everything that ever was will grow alive again: the first man in his sudden ignorance spits a sour apple whole, turns to her, who will be no more than an ache in the bones of his heart, as you are for me; for this breath, in my arms, the rain falling through the moment's light; then let me rest for one day, for the strength to unmake myself; the beasts of the earth and the great whales, to shift continents into oceans, to take down the firmament and blink into the failing light, the failing darkness for a moment's breath, a moment's touch, brushing your heart like this, as all things fall back into themselves, leaving nothing in the beginning but the word.”

“We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.”

“They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.”

“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.”

“I don’t find our relative insignificance disheartening at all: The main thing it tells me is that in a culture that worships celebrity and the purportedly extraordinary, ALL people are ordinary people. ALL people have the same responsibilities to themselves and to each other. Maybe the universe cares nothing for us, but WE care about each other. And most encouragingly, we care not just for our friends or family but for the whole enterprise of life—we care about strangers and about humpback whales and, most beautifully of all, we care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That’s how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too.”