Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.

Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.

What can I have that I still want?

There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

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.