I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.

The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.

I'm seventy-five now. I also have the peculiar luck of having a sister and brother who are fourteen and sixteen years older than me. Their health is not good. It couldn't be at that age. But their spirits are. Both my brother and my sister are an example to me.

This hill crossed with broken pines and maples lumpy with the burial mounds of uprooted hemlocks (hurricane of '38) out of their rotting hearts generations rise trying once more to become the forest just beyond them tall enough to be called trees in their youth like aspen a bouquet of young beech is gathered they still wear last summer's leaves the lightest brown almost translucent how their stubbornness has decorated the winter woods.

I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.