• Fishmonger, Marsden Hartley
• Promises Like Pie Crust, Christina Georgina Rossetti
• I am not Yours, Sara Teasdale
• Your Catfish Friend, Richard Brautigan
• Hope is the Thing, Emily Dickinson
• I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind, Emily Dickinson
• The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
• Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Emily Dickinson
• Death of an Innocent (Mom), Author unknown
• Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep, Mary Elizabeth Frye
• A Man of Words and Not of Deeds, Nursery Rhyme
• The Waking, Theodore Roethke
• If You Forget Me, Pablo Neruda
• As I Walked Out One Evening, W.H. Auden
• Keats letter to Fanny Brawne
• “What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.” ― John Green, Paper Towns
• "then is it sin To rush into the secret house of death, Ere death dare come to us?"-Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
• My friends have always told me I'm a pessimist,that I tend ot see the dark side of everything, and I think that may have something to do with my dad dying when I was so young. It was definitely a shock when he died. The worst possible scenario is always taking shape behind the scenes, where no one can detect it or see it coming, and the one day, boom, it becomes your reality. And once it's real, it's too late to do anything about it. That's what I learned from my father's death.-In the Miso Soup, pg 81
• We ourselves shall be loved and then forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. -the bridge of San Luis Rey
• The Mommy, she used to tell him she was sorry. People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren’t going to eat the kids. The test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. And because there’s no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we’re left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention. The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better. This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him. She used to say, “The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight.” Caged inside too many laws. By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn’t real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture. The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create. Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memories, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you’ll have left. -Choke

​ http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/10/wedding-thoughts-all-i-know-about-love.html?m=1

​ Maggie smith poem Good bones