Fighting dragons is my holy joy.

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.

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

[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .

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