...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.

I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.

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.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

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.

True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.