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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.

-May Sarton

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What Frightens Me About

May Sarton

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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.

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I Would Like To Believe When I Die That I Have Given Myself Away Like A Tree That Sows Seed Every Spring And Never Counts The Loss, Because It Is Not Loss, It Is Adding To Future Life. It Is The Tree's Way Of Being. Strongly Rooted Perhaps, But Spilling Out Its Treasure On The Wind.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Absence Becomes The Greatest Presence.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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!

A Good Marriage Shuts Out A Very Great Deal.

Gardening Is An Instrument Of Grace.

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

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

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.

When I Am Working I Immediately Feel Hopeful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

One Of The Springs Of Poetry Is Joy.

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

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.

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.

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

Fire Is A Good Companion For The Mind.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

Mountains Define You. You Cannot Define / Them.

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

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.

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.

Where Joy In An Old Pencil Is Not Absurd.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We Only Keep What We Lose.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

True Power Is Given To The Vulnerable.

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

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

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!

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

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

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".

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

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?

Life Is Always Bringing Unexpected Gifts.

Unexpected Gifts

Time Spent With Poets Is Never Wasted.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Solitude Is One Thing And Loneliness Is Another.

A Poet Never Feels Useful.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

Gardening Is The Instrument Of Grace.

Women's Work Is Always Toward Wholeness.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

People Who Cannot Feel Punish Those Who Do.

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

Important Things

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Your Poems Will Happen When No One Is There.

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.

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 Feels A Long Way Up And Down From Zero.

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 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.

They Are Commiting Murder Who Merely Live.

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

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.

Instant Intimacy Was Too Often Followed By Disillusion.

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

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

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

Light Is Snow Sifted / To An Abstraction.

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

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

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

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!

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It Takes A Long Time For Words To Become Thought.

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

Fighting Dragons Is My Holy Joy.

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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Sebastian Junger

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