There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.

And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.

Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.

Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.

Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.