Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.