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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.

-May Sarton

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When We Speak Of

May Sarton

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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.

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Intimate Relationships

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Read Between The Lines

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Self Confidence

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Light Is Snow Sifted / To An Abstraction.

They Are Commiting Murder Who Merely Live.

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

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.

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

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.

Time Spent With Poets Is Never Wasted.

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.

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

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

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 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 Feels A Long Way Up And Down From Zero.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

And I Refuse To Feel Guilty About Not Letter-writing Either. There Are Times When One Can, Times When One Can't. In The Times When An Enormous Amount Of Living Is Going On, One Can't.

We 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.

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.

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

Life Is Always Bringing Unexpected Gifts.

Unexpected Gifts

Gardening Is The 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 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.

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

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.

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

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!

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?

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

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".

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

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.

Poetry Finds Its Perilous Equilibrium Somewhere Between Music And Speech.

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.

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.

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?

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!

A Good Marriage Shuts Out A Very Great Deal.

Fire Is A Good Companion For The Mind.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

People Who Cannot Feel Punish Those Who Do.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

When I Am Working I Immediately Feel Hopeful.

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

Excellence Costs A Great Deal.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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

Solitude Is One Thing And Loneliness Is Another.

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.

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.

Real Joy Is Becoming Exceedingly Rare Among Artists Of Any Kind. And I Have An Idea That Those Who Can And Do Communicate It Are Always People Who Have Had A Hard Time. Then The Joy Has No Smugness Or Self-righteousness In It, Is Inclusive Not Exclusive, And Comes Close To Prayer.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What Can I Have That I Still Want?

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

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

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

How Slowly One Comes To Understand Anything!

Where Joy In An Old Pencil Is Not Absurd.

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

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.

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

Important Things

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

True Power Is Given To The Vulnerable.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

... 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Fighting Dragons Is My Holy Joy.

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.

Failure Would Only Be If You Had Somewhere Stopped Growing. As Far As I Can See The Whole Duty Of The Artist Is To Keep On Growing.

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

I Suppose One Has To Remember That 'life' Is Important Too, Though It's Something I Forget In Some Moods, Everything Except Work Seeming Like An Interruption Or Really Non-life.

I 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.

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.

We Only Keep What We Lose.

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

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!

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

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

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

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

One Of The Springs Of Poetry Is Joy.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

True Feeling Justifies Whatever It May Cost.

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

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

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 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.

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.

Instant Intimacy Was Too Often Followed By Disillusion.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Learning To Trust

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

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.

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

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.

I Want Feelings To Be Expressed, To Be Open, To Be Natural, Not To Be Looked On As Strange. It's Not Weird If You Feel Deeply.

It Is 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.

... Love Is Healing, Even Rootless Love.

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 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).

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Charlie Kaufman

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