You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.

The artist must create himself or be born again.

Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

If woman is inconstant, good, I am faithful to ebb and flow, I fall in season and now is a time of ripening.

In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the arms - so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down.

Very few people really see things unless they've had someone in early life who made them look at things. And name them too. But the looking is primary, the focus.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.