I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.
At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.
A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.
They are commiting murder who merely live.
In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
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.
People who cannot feel punish those who do.
Do I think there’s life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.
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.
Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
True power is given to the vulnerable.
It takes a long time for words to become thought...
It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person...
I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely ’played.
Women’s work is always toward wholeness.
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.
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!
Love is our human miracle.
Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?