It is a difficult lesson to learn today-to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.

If it is a woman's function to give, she must be replenished, too.

The nicest gifts are those left, nameless and quiet, unburdened with love, or vanity, or the desire for attention.

When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.

Great problems that face the world today in both the private and the public sphere cannot be solved by women – or by men – alone. They can only be surmounted by men and women side by side.

...the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom. The only real security is... living in the present and accepting it as it is now.

Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air.