One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about

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.

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.

The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.

Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed

Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.