It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

a poet never feels useful.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.

If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.