letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.

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

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

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

For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.

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?

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.