For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?

[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .