I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.

gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.