It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.

Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.

It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, the soul rests.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.