When an elder turns to face the dead, that means he turns away from facing the future and his own retirement in Phoenix, let's say. He turns and finds himself facing the children.

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

You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.

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

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.

I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.