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

The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.

I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.

They are commiting murder who merely live.

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.