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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.

-May Sarton

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If I Were To

May Sarton

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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.

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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.

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Absence Becomes The Greatest Presence.

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True Power Is Given To The Vulnerable.

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

Where Joy In An Old Pencil Is Not Absurd.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

We Only Keep What We Lose.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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?

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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.

Time Spent With Poets Is Never Wasted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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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!

... 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Poetry Finds Its Perilous Equilibrium Somewhere Between Music And Speech.

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

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

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

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

Without Anxiety Life Would Have Very Little Savor.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I 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.

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.

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

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.

One Of The Springs Of Poetry Is Joy.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Fire Is A Good Companion For The Mind.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

Light Is Snow Sifted / To An Abstraction.

Keep Busy With Survival. Imitate The Trees. Learn To Lose In Order To Recover, And Remember Nothing Stays The Same For Long, Not Even Pain. Sit It Out. Let It All Pass. Let It Go.

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.

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

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

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

When I Am Working I Immediately Feel Hopeful.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

Mountains Define You. You Cannot Define / Them.

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

Learning To Trust

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

Self Confidence

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Solitude Is One Thing And Loneliness Is Another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gardening Is The Instrument Of Grace.

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

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?

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

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

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!

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

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

What Can I Have That I Still Want?

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.

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.

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

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

Important Things

They Are Commiting Murder Who Merely Live.

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.

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

True Feeling Justifies Whatever It May Cost.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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Queen Rania Of Jordan

Steven Soderbergh

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