Quote collection
275 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place."
"We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death."
"Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience."
"I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress."
"We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else."
"I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me."
"A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass."
"Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way."
"At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth."
"The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged."
"And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die."
"It takes a long time for words to become thought."
"Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons."
"I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand."
"Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite."
"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."
"over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about?"
"A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic."
"How much hope, expectation, and sheer hard work goes into the smallest success! There is no being sure of anything except that whatever has been created will change in time."
"A great silence has descended on me for the last six months. I am as silent as an Arab in the desert, as dry, thirsty, and full of wonder and rumours which do not materialize into camels or travellers at all, but just vanish into the silent spaces from where they came. I expect this is a good thing though it is extremely irritating - the brink of a voice and never a voice."