The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.

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!

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

How slowly one comes to understand anything!

I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.