“My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.”

Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.

You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.

We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.

In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

The “divinity that shapes our ends” is in ourselves.

I am losing parts of you like I lose eyelashes unknowingly and everywhere.

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it.

We began with honesty let us end in it too.

If you tried and didn’t end up where you wanted to go that’s still progress.

Together we are an endless conversation.

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

I feel your absence deeply within my heart because we are already, and almost apart.