For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you’re feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you’re reading.
I want feelings to be expressed, to be open, to be natural, not to be looked on as strange. It’s not weird if you feel deeply.
One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent.
If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?
There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.
May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best – out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.
The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.
The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It’s a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.
It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, the soul rests.
I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people...
One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.
In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing – the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.
I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.
I feel more alive when I’m writing than I do at any other time – except maybe when I’m making love.
One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?
Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.
Time spent with poets is never wasted.
What can I have that I still want?
I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, ‘won’t go,’ or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person’s face.
Nobody stays special when they’re old, Anna. That’s what we have to learn.