We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.
Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
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.
A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable
I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.
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.
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
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.
Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.
True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
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.
Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.
A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.
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.
It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
For after all we make our faces as we go along...
Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.
So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.
The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.
I am not ready to die, But I am learning to trust death As I have trusted life. I am moving Toward a new freedom
For a long time, for years, I have carried in my mind the excruciating image of plants, bulbs, in a cellar, trying to grow without light, putting out white shoots that will inevitably wither.
It is not so much trying to keep alive As trying to keep from blowing apart From inner explosions every day.
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Nothing moves fast in Texas except the windmills And the hawk that rises up with a clatter of wings. (Nothing more startling there than sudden motion, Everything is so still.)
When grace is given it comes to us as joy, maybe, but it can also be earned, I am convinced, through the rigorous examination of the sources of pain.
I reach and have reached the timeless moment, the pure suspension within time, only through love.
Don't deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
...when the petals fall Say it is beautiful and good, say it is well
We have to break the mirror to be ourselves...
Still, a person who cannot express love is stopping the flow of life, is censoring where censorship is a form of self-indulgence, the fear of giving oneself away.
It is never a waste of time to be outdoors, and never a waste of time to rest, even for a few hours.
Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.
We fear disturbance, change, fear to bring to light and to talk about what is painful. Suffering often feels like failure, but it is actually the door into growth.
It is alarming to feel the soul Leap to the surface and find no sheltering wall.
For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.
For only the ill are well, Only the hunted, free
Alive to the loving past She conjures her own. Nothing is wholly lost— Sun on the stone. And lilacs in their splendor Like lost friends Come back through grief to tell her Love never ends.
But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.
It is time I came back to my real life After this voyage to an island with no name, Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.
It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.
Art must be nourished by faith, the faith of an equal.
Fighting dragons is my holy joy.
I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breaths and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.
What we have not has made us what we are. Those surface consolations have to go.
So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
Sometimes I imagine life itself as merely a long preparation and waiting, a long darkness of growth toward these adventures of the spirit, a picaresque novel, so to speak, in which the episodes are all inward.
It feels a long way up and down from zero.
It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover or the work.
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In the end what kills is not agony (for agony at least asks something of the soul) but everyday life.
And now we who are writing women and strange monsters Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers, Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands More gently and more subtly on the burning sands.
