Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.

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

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

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.

There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.