gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.

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.

For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.