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.
Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.
Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed.
We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.
Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.
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.
Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
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.
You will always be here with me; As long as I live, A towering figure of love.
It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn’t there.
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.
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.
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
For after all we make our faces as we go along...
True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.