... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.

a poet never feels useful.

I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.