There are some griefs so loudThey could bring down the sky,And there are griefs so stillNone knows how deep they lie,Endured, never expended.There are old griefs so proudThey never speak a word;They never can be...

I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed...

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the...

What does myself now say to me?”Open the door of Mystery.

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange – that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life...

I felt pain like an assault,The old pain againWhen the world thrusts itself inside,When we have to take in the outside,When we have to decideTo be the crazy-human with hopeOr just plain crazyWith fear.

And now we who are writing women and strange monstersStill search our hearts to find the difficult answers,Still hope that we may learn to lay our handsMore gently and more subtly on the burning sands.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom

…when the petals fallSay it is beautiful and good, say it is well

The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new...

I can tell you that solitudeIs not all exaltation, inner spaceWhere the soul breaths and work can be done.Solitude exposes the nerve,Raises up ghosts.The past, never at rest, flows through it.

For after all we make our faces as we go along…

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a...

It is time I came back to my real lifeAfter this voyage to an island with no name,Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing–the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or...

Where music thundered let the mind be still,Where the will triumphed let there be no will,What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

…The means of choice:She might choose to ascendThe falling dream,By some angelic power without a nameReverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,Know height without an end,Density melt to air, silence yield a voice–Within her fall she...

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you’re feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you’re reading.

But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.

A bolt that raised her heart to blazing heightAnd made the vertical the very thrust of hope,And found its path at last(Slow work of Grace).

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.

I feel more alive when I’m writing than I do at any other time–except maybe when I’m making love.

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine–why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly...

There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person...

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.