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

How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!

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

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

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?

Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.

The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.