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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.

-May Sarton

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For Poetry Exists To

May Sarton

...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Letters Are So Much Easier Than Living. One Can Give One's Best.

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?

Instant Intimacy Was Too Often Followed By Disillusion.

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.

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

I Believe That Children Long For Form Just As Grownups Do, And That It Releases Rather Than Cramps Creative Energy.

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.

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

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.

True Feeling Justifies Whatever It May Cost.

Gardening Is The Instrument Of Grace.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

When I Am Working I Immediately Feel Hopeful.

The Poet Must Be Free To Love Or Hate As The Spirit Moves Him, Free To Change, Free To Be A Chameleon, Free To Be An Enfant Terrible. He Must Above All Never Worry About This Effect On Other People.

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.

The Tragic Thing About Learning From Experience Is I Fear That One Can Only Learn From One's Own Experience. Other People's - Other Nations' - Experiences Simply Do Not Help. They Can Be Imaginatively Learned From. But People Do Not Act On Other People's Experiences.

Fire Is A Good Companion For The Mind.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Loneliness Is The Poverty Of Self; Solitude Is The Richness Of Self.

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.

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

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

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.

We Are All Jellyfish, Too Pitiful And Too Afraid Of Being Disliked To Be Honest.

I Would Predicate That In All Great Works Of Genius Masculine And Feminine Elements In The Personality Find Expression, Whether This Androgynous Nature Is Played Out Sexually Or Not.

Masculine And Feminine

Excellence Costs A Great Deal.

The Ambience Here Is Order And Beauty. That Is What Frightens Me When I Am First Alone Again. I Feel Inadequate. I Have Made An Open Place, A Place For Meditation. What If I Cannot Find Myself Inside It?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Where Joy In An Old Pencil Is Not Absurd.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Where Music Thundered Let The Mind Be Still, Where The Will Triumphed Let There Be No Will, What Light Revealed, Now Let The Dark Fulfill.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Light Is Snow Sifted / To An Abstraction.

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

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

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 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.

How Slowly One Comes To Understand Anything!

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.

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 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.

Life Is Always Bringing Unexpected Gifts.

Unexpected Gifts

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

Important Things

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

A Poet Never Feels Useful.

People Who Cannot Feel Punish Those Who Do.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

We Only Keep What We Lose.

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

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.

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

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.

Time Unbounded Is Hard To Handle.

The Fact Is That I Have Lived With The Belief That Power, Any Kind Of Power, Was The One Thing Forbidden To Poets. ... Power Requires That The Inner Person Never Be Unmasked. No, We Poets Have To Go Naked. And Since This Is So, It Is Better That We Stay Private People; A Naked Public Person Would Be Rather Ridiculous, What?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Love Is Our Human Miracle.

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

Self Confidence

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

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.

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.

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

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

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. . . .

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?

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

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.

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 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.

“how Does One Grow Up?” I Asked A Friend The Other Day. There Was A Slight Pause; Then She Answered, “by Thinking.”

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.

The Minute One Utters A Certainty, The Opposite Comes To Mind.

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

The Beginner Hugs His Infant Poem To Him And Does Not Want It To Grow Up. But You May Have To Break Your Poem To Remake It.

In The Country Of Pain We Are Each Alone.

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

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.

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 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.

Solitude Is One Thing And Loneliness Is Another.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

... Love Is Healing, Even Rootless Love.

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.

A Man With A Talent Does What Is Expected Of Him, Makes His Way, Constructs, Is An Engineer, A Composer, A Builder Of Bridges. It's The Natural Order Of Things That He Construct Objects Outside Himself And His Family. The Woman Who Does So Is Aberrant. We Have To Expiate For This Cursed Talent Someone Handed Out To Us, By Mistake, In The Black Mystery Of Genetics.

I Can Tell You That Solitude Is Not All Exaltation, Inner Space Where The Soul Breathes And Work Can Be Done. Solitude Exposes The Nerve, Raises Up Ghosts. The Past, Never At Rest, Flows Through It.

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.

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

Solitude Is The Salt Of Personhood. It Brings Out The Authentic Flavor Of Every Experience.

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

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

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.

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

Read Between The Lines

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

...i Feel More Alive When I'm Writing Than I Do At Any Other Time--except When I'm Making Love. Two Things When You Forget Time, When Nothing Exists Except The Moment--the Moment Of Writing, The Moment Of Love. That Perfect Concentration Is Bliss.

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

Women's Work Is Always Toward Wholeness.

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.

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.

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.

The More Articulate One Is, The More Dangerous Words Become.

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".

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.

True Power Is Given To The Vulnerable.

It Feels A Long Way Up And Down From Zero.

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.

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?

Lunches Are Just Not Good. They Take The Heart Out Of The Day And The Spaciousness From The Morning's Work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Is Dangerous It Seems To Me For A Civilization When There Is A Complete Abyss Betewen People In General And The Artists. Or Is It Always So? The Poets Who Are Most Ardently On The People's Side Write In Such A Way That The People Cannot See Rhyme Nor Reason To Their Work.

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.

I Have Written Every Poem, Every Novel, For The Same Purpose-to Find Out What I Think, To Know Where I Stand.

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

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

Have The Courage To Write Whatever Your Dream Is For Yourself.

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

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?

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

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.

In The Garden The Door Is Always Open Into The "holy" - Growth, Birth, Death. Every Flower Holds The Whole Mystery In Its Short Cycle, And In The Garden We Are Never Far Away From Death, The Fertilizing, Good, Creative Death.

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

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.

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!

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

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

They Are Commiting Murder Who Merely Live.

Innocence Is Not Pure So Much As Pleased, Always Expectant, Bright-eyed, Self-enclosed

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

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