When you change the way you look at a thing, the thing itself changes...By mastering feelings, she had come to understand the meaning of discipline and its reward: freedom and power.

When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.

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

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.

Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.

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

Fire is a good companion for the mind.