Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Love cannot exorcise the gifts of hate. / Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight, / But laughter we can never over-rate.
The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.
The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.
each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.
I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.
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.
People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.
Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.
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.
When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?
The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation....It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental.
He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.
Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.
Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.
[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .
I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope and is always thrilling.
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.
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 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.
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.
Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter?
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.
we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.
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.
The only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth.
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.
At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.
Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
I know you have much to bear with in me, and I really do sometimes in you, but I have never looked at friendship in a deep sense as easy or entirely comfortable.
There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .
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.
The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.
Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.
Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!
... if one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.
How much hope, expectation, and sheer hard work goes into the smallest success! There is no being sure of anything except that whatever has been created will change in time.
It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.
One does not "find oneself" by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine. . . who one is and wants to be.
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.
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.
Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.