What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

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

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

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

I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems.

I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.