[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

One does not "find oneself" by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine. . . who one is and wants to be.

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

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.

How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!