The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

The only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth.

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?

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.