I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life.

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

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

It's extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other - there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.

Fighting dragons is my holy joy.