I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people.

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.

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

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

Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.

when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.

Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.