Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.
Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed
For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.
We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.
What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.
It is dark now. The snow is deep blue and the ocean nearly black. It is time for some music.
Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation
Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.
For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.
I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.
We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.
What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?
Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.
It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.
It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.
Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.
You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.
I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.
I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.
I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.
I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.
I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people.
I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.
I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.
Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?
all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.
I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.
“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”
In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.
The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.
There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.