What is there to do when people die – people so dear and rare – but bring them back by remembering?
People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!
Excellence costs a great deal.
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.
Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.
Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn’t heard.
A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.
The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable.
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.
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 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.
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
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.
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.
Time unbounded is hard to handle.
People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.
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...
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 hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.