If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?
Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.
May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.
O cruel cloudless space, And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies! Why do we feel restored As in a sacramental place? Here Mystery is artifice, And here a vision of such peace is stored, Healing flows from it through our eyes.
There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.
There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.
Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
Here life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage - one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair - the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the sacred.
When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.
There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .
For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.
I know you have much to bear with in me, and I really do sometimes in you, but I have never looked at friendship in a deep sense as easy or entirely comfortable.
Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.
At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.
We only keep what we lose.
when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.
It's extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other - there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.
Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.
Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?
For after all we make our faces as we go along.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: