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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.

-May Sarton

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I Suppose I Envy

May Sarton

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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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Instant Intimacy Was Too Often Followed By Disillusion.

... 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 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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Women's Work Is Always Toward Wholeness.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

A Poet Never Feels Useful.

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.

Without Anxiety Life Would Have Very Little Savor.

Absence Becomes The Greatest Presence.

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.

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.

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

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

Mountains Define You. You Cannot Define / Them.

Time Spent With Poets Is Never Wasted.

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.

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!

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.

What Can I Have That I Still Want?

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

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

In The Country Of Pain We Are Each Alone.

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.

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

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.

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.

Where Joy In An Old Pencil Is Not Absurd.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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 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.

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?

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

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.

Time Unbounded Is Hard To Handle.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Learning To Trust

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

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?

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

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

Fighting Dragons Is My Holy Joy.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

Self Confidence

Love Is Our Human Miracle.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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".

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

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

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

It Takes A Long Time For Words To Become Thought.

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.

How Slowly One Comes To Understand Anything!

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.

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

Light Is Snow Sifted / To An Abstraction.

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.

Life Is Always Bringing Unexpected Gifts.

Unexpected Gifts

Solitude Is One Thing And Loneliness Is Another.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Poetry Finds Its Perilous Equilibrium Somewhere Between Music And Speech.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When I Am Working I Immediately Feel Hopeful.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

One Of The Springs Of Poetry Is Joy.

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

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

Gardening Is The Instrument Of Grace.

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!

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.

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

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

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

Gardening Is An Instrument Of Grace.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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

People Who Cannot Feel Punish Those Who Do.

... Love Is Healing, Even Rootless Love.

In The Middle Of The Night, Things Well Up From The Past That Are Not Always Cause For Rejoicing--the Unsolved, The Painful Encounters, The Mistakes, The Reasons For Shame Or Woe. But All, Good Or Bad, Give Me Food For Thought, Food To Grow On.

If We Are To Understand The Human Condition, And If We Are To Accept Ourselves In All The Complexity, Self-doubt, Extravagance Of Feeling, Guilt, Joy, The Slow Freeing Of The Self To Its Full Capacity For Action And Creation, Both As Human Being And As Artist, We Have To Know All We Can About Each Other, And We Have To Be Willing To Go Naked.

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