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.
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.
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.
It feels a long way up and down from zero.
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.
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.
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.
Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.
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 inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
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?
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.
In the garden the door is always open into the holy.
We only keep what we lose.
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.
I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.
I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.
Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.