We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

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.

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

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

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope and is always thrilling.