making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

Unless the gentle inherit the earth, / There will be no earth.

Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

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?

At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.