I think one must do the thing -- whatever it is (and it changes from time to time) -- that unites you to the flowing stream of the world. At any price, one must do it first. Otherwise one can do nothing, nothing at all. One is out of touch, out of grace.

Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt A pain undiagnosable but felt.

In general, I feel, or I have come to feel, that the richest writing comes not from the people who dedicate themselves to writing alone. I know this is contradicted again and again but I continue to feel it. They don't, of course, write as much, or as fast, but I think it is riper and more satisfying when it does come. One of the difficulties of writing or doing any kind of creative work in America seems to me to be that we put such stress on production and material results. We put a time pressure and a mass pressure on creative work which are meaningless and infantile in that field.

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other.

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

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

No one, it has been said, will ever look at the Moon in the same way again. More significantly can one say that no one will ever look at the earth in the same way. Man had to free himself from earth to perceive both its diminutive place in a solar system and its inestimable value as a life -fostering planet. As earthmen, we may have taken another step into adulthood. We can see our planet earth with detachment, with tenderness, with some shame and pity, but at last also with love.