Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

The woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman.