To be deeply in love is, of course, a great liberating force.
I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.
Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.
Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves; that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships.
Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.
When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.
The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.
Great problems that face the world today in both the private and the public sphere cannot be solved by women – or by men – alone. They can only be surmounted by men and women side by side.
Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you’re off, that’s all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock.
For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well.
Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds.
It is nice to think how one can be recklessly lost in a daisy!
If it is a woman’s function to give, she must be replenished, too.
Why is life speeded up so? Why are things so terribly, unbearably precious that you can’t enjoy them but can only wait breathless in dread of their going?
It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.
In our family an experience was not finished, nor truly experienced, unless written down and shared with another.
What release to write so that one forgets oneself, forgets one’s companion, forgets where one is or what one is going to do next to be drenched in sleep or in the sea. Pencils and pads and curling blue sheets alive with letters heap up on the desk.
But I want first of all- in fact, as an end to these other desires- to be at peace with myself.
My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me.
For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.