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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?

-May Sarton

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For Of Course One

May Sarton

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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?

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For After All We Make Our Faces As We Go Along.

Love Opens The Doors Into Everything, As Far As I Can See, Including And Perhaps Most Of All, The Door Into One's Own Secret, And Often Terrible And Frightening, Real Self.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Though Friendship Is Not Quick To Burn It Is Explosive Stuff.

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. . . .

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

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

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.

I Asked Myself The Question, 'what Do You Want Of Your Life?' And I Realized With A Start Of Recognition And Terror, 'exactly What I Have - But To Be Commensurate, To Handle It All Better.

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.

A Good Marriage Shuts Out A Very Great Deal.

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

... The Reason Why There Are So Few First-class Poets Is That Many People Have Intense Feelings Or First-class Minds But To Get The Two Together So That You Will Be Willing To Put A Poem Through Sixty Drafts, To Be That Self-critical, To Keep Breaking It Down, That Is What Is Rare. Right Now Most Poetry Is Just Self-indulgence.

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.

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

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

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

For A Long Time Now, Every Meeting With Another Human Being Has Been The Reverberations After Even The Simplest Conversation. But The Deep Collision Is And Has Been With My Unregenerate, Tormenting And Tormented Self...i Am Unable To Become What I See. I Feel Like An Inadequate Machine, A Machine That Breaks Down At Crucial Moments, Grinds To A Dreadful Halt, "won't Go".

True Feeling Justifies Whatever It May Cost.

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

It's Extraordinary How Little Two People Can Understand Each Other And How Cruel Two People Who Are Fond Of Each Other Can Be To Each Other - There Is Practically No Cruelty So Awful Because Their Power To Hurt Is So Great.

In The Very Long Run Any Success Devours - And Perhaps Also Corrupts.

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.

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

I Feel More Alive When I'm Writing Than I Do At Any Other Time--except Maybe When I'm Making Love.

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

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

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.

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

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

Mountains Define You. You Cannot Define / Them.

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

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.

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!

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.

If One Is The Kind Of Creature I Am And Wants To Do The Kind Of Writing I Want To Do, An Undisturbed Bourgeois Existence With No Distractions Seems In Order. A Single Meeting Outside The Family Upsets One's Whole Inner Web, Makes One Start Off On Two-days' Thinking And Weighing, Destroys A Delicate Balance Etc. Etc. ... I Now Have Enough Friends To Last Me A Lifetime And That Is Enough. I Am Going To Close The Doors And Hibernate At Least For A Couple Of Years. I Am Frightfully Depressed About My Work. It Seems To Me Perfectly Mediocre.

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

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.

Life Is Always Bringing Unexpected Gifts.

Unexpected Gifts

It Takes A Long Time For Words To Become Thought.

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

I Live Alone, Perhaps For No Good Reason, For The Reason That I Am An Impossible Creature, Set Apart By A Temperament I Have Never Learned To Use As It Could Be Used, Thrown Off By A Word, A Glance, A Rainy Day, Or One Drink Too Many. My Need To Be Alone Is Balanced Against My Fear Of What Will Happen When Suddenly I Enter The Huge Empty Silence If I Cannot Find Support There. I Go Up To Heaven And Down To Hell In An Hour, And Keep Alive Only By Imposing Upon Myself Inexorable Routines. I Write Too Many Letters And Too Few Poems.

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.

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.

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?

It Is The Place Of Renewal And Of Safety, Where For A Little While There Will Be No Harm Or Attack And, While Every Sense Is Nourished, The Soul Rests.

I Can Understand People Simply Fleeing The Mountainous Effort Christmas Has Become... But There Are Always A Few Saving Graces And Finally They Make Up For All The Bother And Distress.

It Is Harder For Women, Perhaps To Be 'one-pointed,' Much Harder For Them To Clear Space Around Whatever It Is They Want To Do Beyond Household Chores And Family Life. Their Lives Are Fragmented... The Cry Not So Much For A 'a Room Of One's Own' As Time Of One's Own. Conflict Become Acute, Whatever It May Be About, When There Is No Margin Left On Any Day In Which To Try At Least To Resolve It.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Being Very Rich As Far As I Am Concerned Is Having A Margin. The Margin Is Being Able To Give.

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

Important Things

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

There Are Some Griefs So Loud/they Could Bring Down The Sky/and There Are Griefs So Still/none Knows How Deep They Lie.

Am I Too Old, Perhaps, Ever To Take In Another's Life To Share With Mine On A Permanent Basis? If So, I Must Make Do With What I Have... And What I Have Is A Great Richness Of Friends And A Positively Ardent Love Of Nature. Not Nothing!

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

One Of The Springs Of Poetry Is Joy.

Time Unbounded Is Hard To Handle.

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

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

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

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.

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

We Are All, Whether We Know It Or Not, In Search Of A Way To Enrich, To Drink During The Fizz, To Inhale Deeper Our Gifts, In A Desperation For Some Little Understanding Before Death.

Poetry Is A Dangerous Profession Between Conflict And Resolution, Between Feeling And Thought, Between Becoming And Being, Between The Ultra-personal And The Universal - And These Balances Are Shifting All The Time.

Light Is Snow Sifted / To An Abstraction.

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.

Gardening Is An Instrument Of Grace.

One Must Believe That Private Dilemmas Are, If Deeply Examined, Universal, And So, If Expressed, Have A Human Value Beyond The Private, And One Must Also Believe In The Vehicle For Expressing Them, In The Talent.

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.

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

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

Your Poems Will Happen When No One Is There.

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

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

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

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

Learning To Trust

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Time Spent With Poets Is Never Wasted.

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

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.

Words Are My Passion / And Out Of Them And Me / I Would Create Beauty.

Where Joy In An Old Pencil Is Not Absurd.

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

Life Comes In Clusters, Clusters Of Solitude, Then A Cluster When There Is Hardly Time To Breathe.

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.

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.

A House That Does Not Have One Warm, Comfy Chair In It Is Soulless.

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

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.

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

Pain Can Make A Whole Winter Bright, Like Fever, Force Us To Live Deep And Hard.

What Frightens Me About America Today Is That In The Large Majority There Is No Active Sense Of The Value Of The Individual: Few Citizens Feel That They Are The Republic, Responsible For What Happens. And When The Individual In A Democracy Ceases To Feel His Importance, Then There Is Grave Danger That He Will Give Over His Freedom, If Not To A Fascist State, Then To The Advertising Men Or Publicity Agents Or To The Newspaper He Happens To Read.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

How Unnatural The Imposed View, Imposed By A Puritanical Ethos, That Passionate Love Belongs Only To The Young, That People Are Dead From The Neck Down By The Time They Are Forty, And That Any Deep Feeling, Any Passion After That Age, Is Either Ludicrous Or Revolting!

We Only Keep What We Lose.

In The Country Of Pain We Are Each Alone.

A Holiday Gives One A Chance To Look Backward And Forward; To Reset Oneself By An Inner Compass.

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

People Who Cannot Feel Punish Those Who Do.

Solitude Is My Element, And The Reason Is That Extreme Awareness Of Other People... Precludes Awareness Of One's Self So That After A While The Self No Longer Knows That It Exists.

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

One Could Go On Revising A Prose Page Forever Whereas There Is A Point In A Poem When One Knows It Is Done Forever.

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

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

Gardening Is The Instrument Of Grace.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

They Are Commiting Murder Who Merely Live.

Women's Work Is Always Toward Wholeness.

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

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

A Poet Never Feels Useful.

Does One Come To Enjoy Even The Hardships That Help Make One The Person One Is? Or Is It That The Past Becomes A Legend To Be Remembered With Laughter?

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!

A Great Silence Has Descended On Me For The Last Six Months. I Am As Silent As An Arab In The Desert, As Dry, Thirsty, And Full Of Wonder And Rumours Which Do Not Materialize Into Camels Or Travellers At All, But Just Vanish Into The Silent Spaces From Where They Came. I Expect This Is A Good Thing Though It Is Extremely Irritating - The Brink Of A Voice And Never A Voice.

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

... Love Is Healing, Even Rootless Love.

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

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.

I Find That When I Have Any Appointment, Even An Afternoon One, It Changes The Whole Quality Of Time. I Feel Overcharged. There Is No Space For What Wells Up From The Subconscious; Those Dreams And Images Live In Deep Still Water And Simply Submerge When The Day Gets Scattered.

True Power Is Given To The Vulnerable.

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.

Failure Would Only Be If You Had Somewhere Stopped Growing. As Far As I Can See The Whole Duty Of The Artist Is To Keep On Growing.

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

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.

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

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.

We Have To Believe That Every Person Counts, Counts As A Creative Force That Can Move Mountains.

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.

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.

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.

Gardening Is A Madness, A Folly That Does Not Go Away With Age. Quite The Contrary.

Fighting Dragons Is My Holy Joy.

When Addressed, A Gentleman Cat Does Not Move A Muscle. He Looks As If He Hasn't Heard.

We Have To Dare To Be Ourselves, However Frightening Or Strange That Self May Prove To Be.

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.

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

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

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.

I Have Sometimes Wondered Also Whether In People Like Me Who Come To The Boil Fast (soupe Au Lait, The French Call This Trait, Like A Milk Soup That Boils Over) The Tantrum Is Not A Built-in Safety Valve Against Madness Or Illness. ... The Fierce Tension In Me, When It Is Properly Channeled, Creates The Good Tension For Work. But When It Becomes Unbalanced I Am Destructive. How To Isolate That Good Tension Is My Problem These Days. Or, Put In Another Way, How To Turn The Heat Down Fast Enough So The Soup Won't Boil Over!

The Hardest Thing We Are Asked To Do In This World Is To Remain Aware Of Suffering, Suffering About Which We Can Do Nothing.

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.

Real Joy Is Becoming Exceedingly Rare Among Artists Of Any Kind. And I Have An Idea That Those Who Can And Do Communicate It Are Always People Who Have Had A Hard Time. Then The Joy Has No Smugness Or Self-righteousness In It, Is Inclusive Not Exclusive, And Comes Close To Prayer.

I Want Feelings To Be Expressed, To Be Open, To Be Natural, Not To Be Looked On As Strange. It's Not Weird If You Feel Deeply.

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

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.

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

Over And Over Again I Am Struck By The Wordiness Of Modern Poetry, As If Language Had Replaced Experience And Must Be More And More Extreme, Intricate And In A Way Divorced From Life Itself. It Seems As If What We All Need Is A Great Purification - But How Will That Come About?

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

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.

Solitude Is One Thing And Loneliness Is Another.

Love Is Our Human Miracle.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When We Speak Of Being Vulnerable, It Suggests Being Especially Vulnerable To Pain. People For Whom Personal Dignity And Self-sufficiency Are Everything, Do All They Can To Shut It Out. Noli Mi Tangere. They Are Well Aware That Any Intimate Relationship Has Pain In It, Forces A Special Kind Of Awareness, Is Costly, And So They Try To Keep Themselves Unencumbered By Shutting Pain Out As Far As It Is Possible To Do So.

Intimate Relationships

For Inside All The Weakness Of Old Age, The Spirit, God Knows, Is As Mercurial As It Ever Was.

Self Confidence

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

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

We Can Do Anything, Or Almost, But How Balanced, Magnanimous, And Modest One Has To Be To Do Anything! And Also How Patient. It Is As True In The Arts As Anywhere Else.

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

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.

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.

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

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