When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating. . . . As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.

In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.

There are very few adults in our culture able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane - tradition, religion, or devotion.

As a parent you have to do some renunciation.

One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'

Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.