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An Old Body When It Is Loved Becomes A Sacred Treasure; And Sex Itself Must Always, It Seems To Me, Come To Us As A Sacrament And Be So Used Or It Is Meaningless. The Flesh Is Suffused By The Spirit, And It Is Forgetting This In The Act Of Love-making That Creates Cynicism And Despair.

-May Sarton

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An Old Body When

May Sarton

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An Old Body When It Is Loved Becomes A Sacred Treasure; And Sex Itself Must Always, It Seems To Me, Come To Us As A Sacrament And Be So Used Or It Is Meaningless. The Flesh Is Suffused By The Spirit, And It Is Forgetting This In The Act Of Love-making That Creates Cynicism And Despair.

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I Sometimes Think Men Don't 'hear' Very Well, If I Take Your Meaning To Be 'understand What Is Going On In A Person.' That's What Makes Them So Restful. Women Wear Each Other Out With Their Everlasting Touching Of The Nerve.

I Know You Have Much To Bear With In Me, And I Really Do Sometimes In You, But I Have Never Looked At Friendship In A Deep Sense As Easy Or Entirely Comfortable.

They Are Commiting Murder Who Merely Live.

Solitude Is One Thing And Loneliness Is Another.

Try Making A Poem As If It Were A Table, Clear And Solid, Standing There Outside You.

When You Change The Way You Look At A Thing, The Thing Itself Changes...by Mastering Feelings, She Had Come To Understand The Meaning Of Discipline And Its Reward: Freedom And Power.

A Body Without Bones Would Be A Limp Impossible Mess, So A Day Without Steady Routine Would Be Disruptive And Chaotic.

Do I Think There's Life After Death? No, I Think My Books Are My Life After Death.

Read Between The Lines.then Meet Me In The Silence If You Can.

Read Between The Lines

One Thing Is Certain, And I Have Always Known It - The Joys Of My Life Have Nothing To Do With Age. They Do Not Change. Flowers, The Morning And Evening Light, Music, Poetry, Silence, The Goldfinches Darting About

The Gift Turned Inward, Unable To Be Given, Becomes A Heavy Burden, Even Sometimes A Kind Of Poison. It Is As Though The Flow Of Life Were Backed Up.

Do Not Deprive Me Of My Age. I Have Earned It.

Whatever Peace I Know Rests In The Natural World, In Feeling Myself A Part Of It, Even In A Small Way.

Sometimes One Has Simply To Endure A Period Of Depression For What It May Hold Of Illumination If One Can Live Through It, Attentive To What It Exposes Or Demands.

The Creative Person, The Person Who Moves From An Irrational Source Of Power, Has To Face The Fact That This Power Antagonizes. Under All The Superficial Praise Of The Creative Is The Desire To Kill. It Is The Old War Between The Mystic And The Nonmystic, A War To The Death.

May We Agree That Private Life Is Irrelevant? Multiple, Mixed, Ambiguous At Best - Out Of It We Try To Fashion The Crystal Clear, The Singular, The Absolute, And That Is What Is Relevant; That Is What Matters.

For To Be Desperate Is To Discover Strength. / We Die Of Comfort And By Conflict Live.

If Art Is Not To Be Life-enhancing, What Is It To Be?

She Became For Me An Island Of Light, Fun, Wisdom Where I Could Run With My Discoveries And Torments And Hopes At Any Time Of Day And Find Welcome.

It Is Only When We Can Believe That We Are Creating The Soul That Life Has Any Meaning, But When We Can Believe It - And I Do And Always Have - Then There Is Nothing We Do That Is Without Meaning And Nothing That We Suffer That Does Not Hold The Seed Of Creation In It.

There Is A Wilder Solitude In Winter When Every Sense Is Pricked Alive And Keen.

Words Are More Powerful Than Perhaps Anyone Suspects, And Once Deeply Engraved In A Child's Mind, They Are Not Easily Eradicated.

The Price Of Being Oneself Is So High And Involves So Much Ruthlessness Toward Others (or What Looks Like Ruthlessness In Our Duty-bound Culture) That Very Few People Can Afford It.

Mountains Define You. You Cannot Define / Them.

True Feeling Justifies Whatever It May Cost.

One Of The Springs Of Poetry Is Joy.

One Of The Good Elements Of Old Age Is That We No Longer Have To Prove Anything, To Ourselves Or To Anyone Else. We Are What We Are.

I Loved Them All The Way One Loves At Any Age -- If It's Real At All -- Obsessively, Painfully, With Wild Exultation, With Guilt, With Conflict; I Wrote Poems To And About Them, I Put Them Into Novels (disguised Of Course); I Brooded Upon Why They Were As They Were, So Often Maddening Don't You Know? I Wrote Them Ridiculous Letters. I Lived With Their Faces. I Knew Their Every Gesture By Heart. I Stalked Them Like Wild Animals. I Studied Them As If They Were Maps Of The World -- And In A Way I Suppose They Were.

Revision Is Not Going Back And Fussing Around, But Going Forward Into The Process Of Creation

It Always Comes Back To The Same Necessity: Go Deep Enough And There Is A Bedrock Of Truth, However Hard.

An Old Body When It Is Loved Becomes A Sacred Treasure; And Sex Itself Must Always, It Seems To Me, Come To Us As A Sacrament And Be So Used Or It Is Meaningless. The Flesh Is Suffused By The Spirit, And It Is Forgetting This In The Act Of Love-making That Creates Cynicism And Despair.

True Power Is Given To The Vulnerable.

What Is There To Do When People Die - People So Dear And Rare - But Bring Them Back By Remembering?

People Are Always Talking About The Joys Of Youth-but, Oh, How Youth Can Suffer!

It Is Sometimes The Most Fragile Things That Have The Power To Endure And Become Sources Of Strength.

So Let The World Go, But Hold Fast To Joy.

Old Age Is Not An Illness, It Is A Timeless Ascent. As Power Diminishes, We Grow Toward The Light.

It Is Curious How Any Making Of Order Makes One Feel Mentally Ordered, Ordered Inside.

For Of Course One Is Never Safe When In Love. Growth Is Demanding And May Seem Dangerous, For There Is Loss As Well As Gain In Growth. But Why Go On Living If One Has Ceased To Grow? And What More Demanding Atmosphere For Growth Than Love In Any Form, Than Any Relationship Which Can Call Out And Requires Of Us Our Most Secret And Deepest Selves?

My Own Feeling Is That The Only Possible Reason For Engaging In The Hard Labor Of Writing A Novel, Is That One Is Bothered By Something One Needs To Understand, And Can Come To Understand Only Through The Characters In The Imagined Situation.

Instant Intimacy Was Too Often Followed By Disillusion.

[in Old Age] There Is A Childlike Innocence, Often, That Has Nothing To Do With The Childishness Of Senility. The Moments Become Precious . . .

Unless The Gentle Inherit The Earth, / There Will Be No Earth.

I Feel Often Very Close To The Ecstasy And Anguish Which Lie At The Very Heart Of Poetry - I Am Writing A Lot.

Joy, Happiness ... We Do Not Question. They Are Beyond Question, Maybe. A Matter Of Being. But Pain Forces Us To Think, And To Make Connections ... To Discover What Has Been Happening To Cause It. And, Curiously Enough, Pain Draws Us To Other Human Beings In A Significant Way, Whereas Joy Or Happiness To Some Extent, Isolates.

What Is Destructive Is Impatience, Haste, Expecting Too Much Too Fast.

And One Cold Starry Night / Whatever Your Belief / The Phoenix Will Take Flight / Over The Seas Of Grief / To Sing Her Thrilling Song / To Stars And Waves And Sky / For Neither Old Nor Young / The Phoenix Does Not Die.

Love Is Our Human Miracle.

Why Should It Happen That Among The Great Many Women Whom I See And Am Fond Of, Suddenly Somebody I Meet For Half An Hour Opens The Door Into Poetry?

It Looks As If I Were Meant To Be Alone, And That Any Hope Of Happiness Is Not Meant. Am I Too Old To Acquire The Knack For Happiness?

Were Meant To Be

Wrinkles Here And There Seem Unimportant Compared To The Gestalt Of The Whole Person I Have Become In This Past Year.

I Suppose I Have Written Novels To Find Out What I Thought About Something And Poems To Find Out What I Felt About Something.

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There Were Moments ... When It Seemed That All One Could Be Asked Was Just To Keep The Ashtrays Clean, The Bed Made, The Wastebaskets Emptied, As If One Never Got To The Real Things Because Of The Constant Exhausting Battle To Keep Ordinary Life From Falling Apart.

In The Country Of Pain We Are Each Alone.

In A Total Work, The Failures Have Their Not Unimportant Place.

It Is Dark Now. The Snow Is Deep Blue And The Ocean Nearly Black. It Is Time For Some Music.

I Love Giving Flowers. It Is So Deliciously Unlasting And Romantic.

The Woman Who Needs To Create Works Of Art Is Born With A Kind Of Psychic Tension In Her Which Drives Her Unmercifully To Find A Way To Balance, To Make Herself Whole. Every Human Being Has This Need: In The Artist It Is Mandatory. Unable To Fulfill It, He Goes Mad. But When The Artist Is A Woman She Fulfills It At The Expense Of Herself As A Woman.

Poetry Is First Of All A Way Of Life And Only Secondarily A Way Of Writing.

Growing Old Is, Of All Things We Experience, That Which Takes The Most Courage, And At A Time When We Have The Least Resources, Especially With Which To Meet Frustration.

For Art Is Order, But It Is Born Out Of The Chaos Of Life.

Does Anything In Nature Despair Except Man? An Animal With A Foot Caught In A Trap Does Not Seem To Despair. It Is Too Busy Trying To Survive. It Is All Closed In, To A Kind Of Still, Intense Waiting. Is This A Key? Keep Busy With Survival. Imitate The Trees. Learn To Lose In Order To Recover, And Remember That Nothing Stays The Same For Long, Not Even Pain, Psychic Pain. Sit It Out. Let It All Pass. Let It Go.

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A Garden Is Always A Series Of Losses Set Against A Few Triumphs, Like Life Itself.

We Saw The Strong Trees Struggle And Their Plumes Do Down, The Poplar Bend And Whip Back Till It Split To Fall, The Elm Tear Up At The Root And Topple Like A Crown, The Pine Crack At The Base - We Had To Watch Them All. The Ash, The Lovely Cedar. We Had To Watch Them Fall. They Went So Softly Under The Loud Flails Of Air, Before That Fury They Went Down Like Feathers, With All The Hundred Springs That Flowered In Their Hair, And All The Years, Endured In All The Weathers - To Fall As If They Were Nothing, As If They Were Feathers.

I Simply Adore Being Alone - I Find It A Consuming Thirst - And When That Thirst Is Slaked, Then I Am Happy.

Most People Have To Talk So They Won't Hear.

It Takes A Long Time For Words To Become Thought.

Light Is Snow Sifted / To An Abstraction.

It Is Clear That We Do Not Exactly Choose Our Poems; Our Poems Choose Us.

We Have To Make Myths Of Our Lives, The Point Being That If We Do, Then Every Grief Or Inexplicable Seizure By Weather, Woe, Or Work Can-if We Discipline Ourselves And Think Hard Enough-be Turned To Account, Be Made To Yield Further Insight Into What It Is To Be Alive, To Be A Human Being.

When One's Not Writing Poems - And I'm Not At The Moment - You Wonder How You Ever Did It. It's Like Another Country You Can't Reach.

It Is Possible, I Suppose, That We Are Returning To A Dark Age. What Is Frightening Is That Violence Is Not Only Represented By Nations, But Everywhere Walks Among Us Freely.

I Long For The Bulbs To Arrive, For The Early Autumn Chores Are Melancholy, But The Planting Of Bulbs Is The Work Of Hope And Is Always Thrilling.

I Suppose Real Old Age Begins When One Looks Backward Rather Than Forward

Routine Is Not A Prison, But The Way Into Freedom From Time.

Once More I Realize That Solitude Is My Element, And The Reason Is That Extreme Awareness Of Other People (all Naturally Solitary People Must Feel This) Precludes Awareness Of One's Self, So After A While The Self No Longer Knows That It Exists.

Love Cannot Exorcise The Gifts Of Hate. / Hate Cannot Exorcize What Has No Weight, / But Laughter We Can Never Over-rate.

I Tell The Gods Are Still Alive / And They Are Not Consoling.

Anyone Who Is Going To Be A Writer Knows Enough At Fifteen To Write Several Novels.

Nobody Stays Special When They're Old, Anna. That's What We Have To Learn.

No Partner In A Love Relationship... Should Feel That He Has To Give Up An Essential Part Of Himself To Make It Viable.

It Is Good For A Professional To Be Reminded That His Professionalism Is Only A Husk, That The Real Person Must Remain An Amateur, A Lover Of The Work.

Go Rich In Poverty. Go Rich In Poetry. This Nothingness Is Plentitude.

We Are Able To Laugh When We Achieve Detachment, If Only For A Moment.

It Is, I Assume, Quite Easy To Wither Into Old Age, And Hard To Grow Into It.

More Than Any Other Beauty (though It Is True Of All Beauty Except In Art) Passion Seems To Me To Have The Seeds Of Its Own Destruction In It.

Is It Perhaps The One Necessity Of Love, That It Be Needed? And The One Great Human Tragedy That It So Rarely Is?

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There Was Such A Thing As Women's Work And It Consisted Chiefly, Hilary Sometimes Thought, In Being Able To Stand Constant Interruption And Keep Your Temper. . . .

Death Does Frame A Person And Somehow It Is The Good That Stays.

Everything That Slows Us Down And Forces Patience, Everything That Sets Us Back Into The Slow Circles Of Nature, Is A Help. Gardening Is An Instrument Of Grace.

When It Comes To The Important Things One Is Always Alone.

Important Things

This Suspension Of One's Own Reality, This Being Entirely Alone In A Strange City (at Times I Wondered If I Had Lost The Power Of Speech) Is An Enriching State For A Writer. Then The Written Word ... Takes On An Intensity Of Its Own. Nothing Gets Exteriorized Or Dissipated; All Is Concentrated Within.

If I Were To Choose One Single Thing That That Would Restore Paris To The Senses, It Would Be That Strangely Sweet, Unhealthy Smell Of The Métro, So Very Unlike The Dank Cold Or The Stuffy Heat Of Subways In New York.

The Only Way Through Pain…is To Absorb, Probe, Understand Exactly What It Is And What It Means. To Close The Door On Pain Is To Miss The Chance For Growth.

I See A Certain Order In The Universe And Math Is One Way Of Making It Visible.

It Feels A Long Way Up And Down From Zero.

How Much Hope, Expectation, And Sheer Hard Work Goes Into The Smallest Success! There Is No Being Sure Of Anything Except That Whatever Has Been Created Will Change In Time.

We Are Never Done With Thinking About Our Parents, I Suppose, And Come To Know Them Better Long After They Are Dead Than We Ever Did When They Were Alive.

I Am Not Ready To Die, / But I Am Learning To Trust Death / As I Have Trusted Life.

Learning To Trust

I Think That Passion If Really Intense Is Always Destructive If Not To The Two Involved, Always To Other People.

Don't Forget That Compared To A Grownup Person Every Baby Is A Genius.

One Has Only To Set A Loved Human Being Against The Fact That We Are All In Peril All The Time To Get Back A Sense Of Proportion. What Does Anything Matter Compared To The Reality Of Love And Its Span, So Brief At Best, Maintained Against Such Odds?

Gardening Is The Instrument Of Grace.

A Good Marriage Shuts Out A Very Great Deal.

The Garden Is Growth And Change And That Means Loss As Well As Constant New Treasures To Make Up For A Few Disasters.

I Am Realizing Once And For All The Difference As Far As I Am Concerned Of Women And Men And The Necessity For Both. With A Man, However Tender He Is, One Is Feeding Him - One Is Always And Eternally Understanding, Mothering, Supplying Him With Faith In Himself (not In You).

For Any Writer Who Wants To Keep A Journal, Be Alive To Everything, Not Just To What You're Feeling, But Also To Your Pets, To Flowers, To What You're Reading.

For Me A True Poem Is On The Way When I Begin To Be Haunted, When It Seems As If I Were Being Asked An Inescapable Question By An Angel With Whom I Must Wrestle To Get At The Answer.

There The Door Is Always Open Into The “holy” — Growth, Birth, Death.

There Is Only One Real Deprivation... And That Is Not To Be Able To Give One's Gifts To Those One Loves Most.

I Sometimes Imagine That As One Grows Older One Comes To Live A Role Which As A Young Person One Merely 'played.

When I Am Alone The Flowers Are Really Seen; I Can Pay Attention To Them. They Are Felt As Presences. Without Them I Would Die...they Change Before My Eyes. They Live And Die In A Few Days; They Keep Me Closely In Touch With The Process, With Growth, And Also With Dying. I Am Floated On Their Moments.

Don't Forget That Compared To A Grownup Person Every Baby Is A Genius. Think Of The Capacity To Learn! The Freshness, The Temperament, The Will Of A Baby A Few Months Old!

Self-respect Is Nothing To Hide Behind. When You Need It Most It Isn't There.

In Poetry Compromise Is Fatal. In Action Of Any Cooperative Sort It Is Inevitable. The Thing Is To Find The Balance.

Inside My Mother's Death / I Lay And Could Not Breathe.

Women's Work Is Always Toward Wholeness.

Time Unbounded Is Hard To Handle.

Family Life! The United Nations Is Child's Play Compared To The Tugs And Splits And Need To Understand And Forgive In Any Family.

Poems Like To Have A Destination For Their Flight. They Are Homing Pigeons.

When I Am Working I Immediately Feel Hopeful.

About Loving, I Have Little To Learn From The Young.

Poetry Finds Its Perilous Equilibrium Somewhere Between Music And Speech.

If Art Is Not To Be Life-enhancing, What Is It To Be? Half The World Is Feminine - Why Is There Resentment At A Female-oriented Art? Nobody Asks The Tale Of Genji To Be Masculine! Women Certainly Learn A Lot From Books Oriented Toward A Masculine World. Why Is Not The Reverse Also True? Or Are Men Really So Afraid Of Women's Creativity?

I Feel Happy To Be Keeping A Journal Again. I've Missed It, Missed Naming Things As They Appear, Missed The Half Hour When I Push All Duties Aside And Savor The Experience Of Being Alive In This Beautiful Place.

Do We Always Make Our Freedom Out Of Someone Else's Bondage?

Deep Down There Was Understanding, Not Of The Facts Of Our Lives So Much As Of Our Essential Natures.

So This Was Fame At Last! Nothing But A Vast Debt To Be Paid To The World In Energy, Blood, And Time.

I’m Only Able To Write Poetry, For The Most Part, When I Have A Muse, A Woman Who Focuses The World For Me.

I Cannot Understand Why Poetry Is Not Taught At Schools As A Way Of Seeing, A Quick, Untiring Path To Essentials.

We Cannot Afford Not To Fight For Growth And Understanding, Even When It Is Painful, As It Is Bound To Be.

I Would Like To Believe When I Die That I Have Given Myself Away Like A Tree That Sows Seed Every Spring And Never Counts The Loss, Because It Is Not Loss, It Is Adding To Future Life. It Is The Tree's Way Of Being. Strongly Rooted Perhaps, But Spilling Out Its Treasure On The Wind.

I Feel Like An Inadequate Machine, A Machine That Breaks Down At Crucial Moments, Grinds To A Dreadful Hault, 'won't Go,' Or, Even Worse, Explodes In Some Innocent Person's Face.

Innocent Person

In The Novel Or The Journal You Get The Journey. In A Poem You Get The Arrival.

The Trouble Is, Old Age Is Not Interesting Until One Gets There. It's A Foreign Country With An Unknown Language To The Young And Even To The Middle-aged.

My Musical Genius Reached Its Apex Thirty Years Ago When I Played The Triangle In Haydn's Children's Symphony, So I Could Not Play Unless You Needed Someone To Make One Sustained Note!

One Must Think Like A Hero To Behave Like A Merely Decent Human Being.

O Cruel Cloudless Space, And Pale Bare Ground Where The Poor Infant Lies! Why Do We Feel Restored As In A Sacramental Place? Here Mystery Is Artifice, And Here A Vision Of Such Peace Is Stored, Healing Flows From It Through Our Eyes.

It Is Always Hard To Hear The Buried Truth From Another Person.

Fire Is A Good Companion For The Mind.

For Me The Moral Dilemma This Past Year Has Been How To Make Peace With The Unacceptable.

It Is A Waste Of Time To See People Who Have Only A Social Surface To Show. I Will Make Every Effort To Find Out The Real Person, But If I Can't, Then I Am Upset And Cross. Time Wasted Is Poison.

Gardening Gives One Back A Sense Of Proportion About Everything - Except Itself.

Making Order Out Of Disorder Any Time, Anywhere, Can Be Regarded As A Sacrament.

The Value Of Solitude - One Of Its Values - Is, Of Course, That There Is Nothing To Cushion Against Attacks From Within, Just As There Is Nothing To Help Balance At Times Of Particular Stress Or Depression.

Flowers And Plants Are Silent Presences. They Nourish Every Sense Except The Ear.

Without Anxiety Life Would Have Very Little Savor.

You Will Always Be Here With Me; As Long As I Live, A Towering Figure Of Love.

... Love Is Healing, Even Rootless Love.

Public Education Was Not Founded To Give Society What It Wants. Quite The Opposite.

People Who Are Always Thinking Of The Feelings Of Others Can Be Very Destructive Because They Are Hiding So Much From Themselves.

Now I Become Myself. It’s Taken Time, Many Years And Places.

I Always Forget How Important The Empty Days Are, How Important It May Be Sometimes Not To Expect To Produce Anything, Even A Few Lines In A Journal. A Day When One Has Not Pushed Oneself To The Limit Seems A Damaged Damaging Day, A Sinful Day. Not So! The Most Valuable Thing One Can Do For The Psyche, Occasionally, Is To Let It Rest, Wander, Live In The Changing Light Of A Room.

... If One Does Not Have Wild Dreams Of Achievement, There Is No Spur Even To Get The Dishes Washed. One Must Think Like A Hero To Behave Like A Merely Decent Human Being.

Why Is It That People Who Cannot Show Feeling Presume That That Is A Strength And Not A Weakness?

I Write Poems About Relationships, Love Relationships, And I'm Not Able To Do That All The Time. I Could Go Two Years Without Writing Poems, And Then Write A Dozen. Having A Novel To Work On, With The Intricate Puzzle Of Character And Plot To Work Out, Is Satisfying For The Time There Is No Poetry.

What We Have Not Has Made Us What We Are. / ... / What We Are Not Drives Us To Consummation.

How Slowly One Comes To Understand Anything!

When We Admit Our Vulnerability, We Include Others. If We Deny It, We Shut Them Out.

True Gardeners Cannot Bear A Glove Between The Sure Touch And The Tender Root.

Life Is Always Bringing Unexpected Gifts.

Unexpected Gifts

What Can I Have That I Still Want?

You Can't Plan For A Seizure Of Feeling, And For This Reason I Put Everything Else Aside When I'm Inspired.

Human Relations Just Are Not Fixed In Their Orbits Like The Planets -- They're More Like Galaxies, Changing All The Time, Exploding Into Light For Years, Then Dying Away.

I Write Poems, Have Always Written Them, To Transcend The Painfully Personal And Reach The Universal.

The Most Valuable Thing We Can Do For The Psyche, Occasionally, Is To Let It Rest, Wander, Live In The Changing Light Of Room, Not Try To Be Or Do Anything Whatever.

There Is No Doubt That Solitude Is A Challenge And To Maintain Balance Within It A Precarious Business. But I Must Not Forget That, For Me, Being With People Or Even With One Beloved Person For Any Length Of Time Without Solitude Is Even Worse. I Lose My Center. I Feel Dispersed, Scattered, In Pieces. I Must Have Time Alone In Which To Mull Over My Encounter, And To Extract Its Juice, Its Essence, To Understand What Has Really Happened To Me As A Consequence Of It.

At Some Point I Believe One Has To Stop Holding Back For Fear Of Alienating Some Imaginary Reader Or Real Relative Or Friend, And Come Out With Personal Truth.

I've Been Thinking About Happiness-how Wrong It Is Ever To Expect It To Last Or There To Be A Time Of Happiness. It's Not That, It's A Moment Of Happiness. Almost Every Day Contains At Least One Moment Of Happiness.

At Any Moment Solitude May Put On The Face Of Loneliness.

Here Life Goes On, Even And Monotonous On The Surface, Full Of Lightning, Of Summits And Of Despair, In Its Depths. We Have Now Arrived At A Stage In Life So Rich In New Perceptions That Cannot Be Transmitted To Those At Another Stage - One Feels At The Same Time Full Of So Much Gentleness And So Much Despair - The Enigma Of This Life Grows, Grows, Drowns One And Crushes One, Then All Of A Sudden In A Supreme Moment Of Light One Becomes Aware Of The Sacred.

The Body Is A Universe In Itself And Must Be Held As Sacred As Anything In Creation....it Is Dangerous To Forget The Body As Sacramental.

I Suppose One Has To Remember That 'life' Is Important Too, Though It's Something I Forget In Some Moods, Everything Except Work Seeming Like An Interruption Or Really Non-life.

I Am Not A Greedy Person Except About Flowers And Plants, And Then I Become Fanatically Greedy.

And I Refuse To Feel Guilty About Not Letter-writing Either. There Are Times When One Can, Times When One Can't. In The Times When An Enormous Amount Of Living Is Going On, One Can't.

Poetry Has A Way Of Teaching One What One Needs To Know ... If One Is Honest.

There Is A Proper Balance Between Not Asking Enough Of Oneself And Asking Or Expecting Too Much.

Miracles Cannot Be Explained, That Is Their Miraculous Nature.

Gardening Is An Instrument Of Grace.

Each New Poem Is Partly Propelled By The Formal Energies Of All The Poems That Have Preceded It In The History Of Literature.

All Great People Are Humble Because Great People Have Great Work And Are Humbled By The Largeness Of Their Dreams.

Absence Becomes The Greatest Presence.

I Am Furious At All The Letters To Answer, When All I Want To Do Is Think And Write Poems. ... I Long For Open Time, With No Obligations Except Toward The Inner World And What Is Going On There.

Gardening Is One Of The Rewards Of Middle Age, When One Is Ready For An Impersonal Passion, A Passion That Demands Patience, Acute Awareness Of A World Outside Oneself, And The Power To Keep On Growing Through All The Times Of Drought, Through The Cold Snows, Towards Those Moments Of Pure Joy When All Failures Are Forgotten And The Plum Tree Flowers.

For Poetry Exists To Break Through To Below The Level Of Reason Where The Angels And Monsters That The Amenities Keep In The Cellar May Come Out To Dance, To Rove And Roar, Growling And Singing, To Bring Life Back To The Enclosed Rooms Where Too Often We Are Only 'living And Partly Living.

Fighting Dragons Is My Holy Joy.

I Suppose I Envy Painters Because They Can Meditate On Form And Structure, On Color And Light, And Not Concern Themselves With Human Torment And Chaos. It Is Restful Even To Imagine Expression Without Words.

People Who Cannot Feel Punish Those Who Do.

It Is The Privilege Of Those Who Fear Love To Murder Those Who Do Not Fear It!

I Think Of The Trees And How Simply They Let Go, Let Fall The Riches Of A Season, How Without Grief (it Seems) They Can Let Go And Go Deep Into Their Roots For Renewal And Sleep.... Imitate The Trees. Learn To Lose In Order To Recover, And Remember That Nothing Stays The Same For Long, Not Even Pain, Psychic Pain. Sit It Out. Let It All Pass. Let It Go.

For Poetry Is, I Believe, Always An Act Of The Spirit. The Poem Teaches Us Something While We Make It. The Poem Makes You As You Make The Poem, And Your Making Of The Poem Requires All Your Capacities Of Thought, Feeling, Analysis, And Synthesis.

I Have Never Written A Book That Was Not Born Out Of A Question I Needed To Answer For Myself.

He [the Cat] Wound Himself Around Her Legs, Purring The Purr Of Ardent Desire Like A Kettle Coming To A Boil And Then Bubbling Very Fast.

Women Are At Last Becoming Persons First And Wives Second, And That Is As It Should Be.

Without Darkness, Nothing Comes To Birth, As Without Light, Nothing Flowers.

The More Our Bodies Fail Us, The More Naked And More Demanding Is The Spirit, The More Open And Loving We Can Become If We Are Not Afraid Of What We Are And Of What We Feel. I Am Not A Phoenix Yet, But Here Among The Ashes, It May Be That The Pain Is Chiefly That Of New Wings Trying To Push Through.

One Does Not "find Oneself" By Pursuing One's Self, But On The Contrary By Pursuing Something Else And Learning Through Discipline Or Routine. . . Who One Is And Wants To Be.

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