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

-May Sarton

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Old Age Is Not

May Sarton

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

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... Love Is Healing, Even Rootless Love.

Fighting Dragons Is My Holy Joy.

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

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

Fire Is A Good Companion For The Mind.

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

In The Country Of Pain We Are Each Alone.

Time Spent With Poets Is Never Wasted.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

...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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

They Are Commiting Murder Who Merely Live.

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

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.

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

People Who Cannot Feel Punish Those Who Do.

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!

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

Important Things

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

Mountains Define You. You Cannot Define / Them.

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

It Feels A Long Way Up And Down From Zero.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A Good Marriage Shuts Out A Very Great Deal.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

If 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.

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

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

Read Between The Lines

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.

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.

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

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

Solitude Is One Thing And Loneliness Is Another.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

Love Is Our Human Miracle.

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

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

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.

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

Where Joy In An Old Pencil Is Not Absurd.

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

Absence Becomes The Greatest Presence.

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

Without Anxiety Life Would Have Very Little Savor.

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

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

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.

A Poet Never Feels Useful.

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

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

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 Of The Springs Of Poetry Is Joy.

Life Is Always Bringing Unexpected Gifts.

Unexpected Gifts

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Gardening Is An Instrument Of Grace.

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

Light Is Snow Sifted / To An Abstraction.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Self Confidence

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

Learning To Trust

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 Takes A Long Time For Words To Become Thought.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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".

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.

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.

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

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.

How Slowly One Comes To Understand Anything!

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

... 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

We Only Keep What We Lose.

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.

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

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

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

When I Am Working I Immediately Feel Hopeful.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What Can I Have That I Still Want?

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