To have children is a double living, the earthly fountain of youth, a continual fresh delight, a volcano as well as a fountain, and also a source of weariness beyond description.

Freedom is no guarantee of anything. It is only defined today by what it is not. What it is takes forms strange and of infinite variety - bizarre as in a masquerade.

Teach the legal rights of trees, the nobility of hills; respect the beauty of singularity, the value of solitude.

The dead elm leaves hung like folded bats.

We are dying of preconceptions, outworn rules, decaying flags, venomous religions, and sentimentalities. We need a new world. We've wrenched up all the old roots. The old men have no roots. They don't know it. They just go on talking and flailing away and falling down on the young with their tons of dead weight and their power. For the power is still there, in their life-in-death. But the roots are dead, and the land is poisoned for miles around them.

The things we felt most are hardest to put into words. Hate is always easier to speak of than love. How shall I make love go through the sieve of words and come out something besides a pulp?

I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.