you couldn't talk yourself into love any more than you could talk yourelf out of it.

gardening is a madness and a rapture.

Part of the business of being an artist is abetting talent. The best do that.

There was a strange kind of comfort in misunderstandings and differences that were old enough to have lost their teeth.

Poverty made me feel weak, as if I were coming down with an awful, debilitating, communicable disease - the disease of being without money. Instead of going to the hospital, you went to the poor farm. The difference was, you never got well at the poor farm.

Yet the past has a will of its own, and you must learn to entertain it, because it will visit, invited or not.

If you don't kill yourself right away when something terrible happens ... if you go on living, you become a different person.