Every ending is the start of a new beginning.

Your dreams are the maps to your destiny.

Adventures may be for the adventurous, but home is where the real things are sown and reaped, where in the end the real things happen.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

It takes a long time for words to become thought.

Life is for living, and living is for loving.

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning’s work.

Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.

letters are so much easier than living. One can give one’s best.

Excellence costs a great deal.

Life has no guarantees except that it goes on.

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.

It’s extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other – there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.

Poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.

Happiness is a byproduct of creating.

A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.

Fire is a good companion for the mind.

The way we live is the way we love.

It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

The creative process is the process of self-discovery.

To be an artist is to be constantly in search of truth.

It is dark now. The snow is deep blue and the ocean nearly black. It is time for some music.

Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

Solitude is the one place that is never invaded by others.

The road to self-discovery is never straight.

Instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.

Writing is an act of courage.

Sometimes the more we try to understand, the less we know.

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can’t, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.

Fear is the opposite of love. Love frees you from fear.

Self-acceptance is the foundation for all other things.

Joy, happiness … we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections … to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.

What is there to do when people die – people so dear and rare – but bring them back by remembering?

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

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.

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.

Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child’s mind, they are not easily eradicated.

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.

The capacity for not thinking is a great gift.

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward.

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.

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

We have to be still sometimes in order to listen to our own voice.

Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.

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.

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love.

There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie

The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable.

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.

Most people have to talk so they won’t hear.

I think that we can’t really write unless we live with great openness to life.

I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree’s way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind

No partner in a love relationship should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

I am very much aware that my life is not a story of easy success.

I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.

Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn’t there.

The most profound thing I have learned is that we are all so fragile, and the world is so full of miracles.

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

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

I am not a failure because I have failed. I am a failure because I have given up.

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation.

I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep…. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.