KAIROS A unique time in a person's life; an opportunity for change.
But when Ellen throws at me that I have never had to struggle I feel like saying, 'Maybe. But I have had to learn to be capable in a hundred ways that were no pleasure or nourishment really. If I had not been rich, I might have become a good painter.' Instead, right now I had better get the silver out and see what needs polishing.
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
Think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief ( it seems ) they can let go...Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long...Let it go.
Solitude itself is a way of waiting for the inaudible and the invisible to make itself felt. And that is why solitude is never static and never hopeless. On the other hand, every friend who comes to stay enriches the solitude forever; presence, if it has been real presence, does not ever leave.
Don't deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there's a bedrock of truth, however hard. It looks as if I were "meant" to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant.
It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.
To go with, not against the elements, an inexhaustible vitality summoned back each day to do the same tasks, to feed the animals, clean out barns and pens, keep that complex world alive.
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
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.
The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
I reach and have reached the timeless moment, the pure suspension within time, only through love.
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.
Happy the man who can long roaming reap, Like old Ulysses when he shaped his course Homeward at last toward the native source, Seasoned and stretched to plant his dreaming deep.
A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
Now I become myself. It's taken time, many years and places.
There is always some sleight of hand going on in writing autobiography. So much has to be left out, especially things that might hurt or dismay people. But in a novel one can say everything. The novel is often autobiography distilled and / or transcended.
Machines do things very quickly and outside the natural rhythm of life, and we are indignant if a car doesn't start at the first try. So the few things that we still do, such as cooking (though there are TV dinners!), knitting, gardening, anything at all that cannot be hurried, have a very particular value.
It feels a long way up and down from zero.
Our two solitudes never quite merged, perhaps, but accepted each other gratefully.
Though friendship is not quick to burn, it is explosive stuff.
The trouble is that old age is not interesting until one gets there, a foreign country with an unknown language to the young, and even to the middle-aged.
Women have come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves...This cannot be done against men, and that's the real problem...It cannot be woman against man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without man, but not against man.
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die. Why do I say that? Partly because they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.
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.
Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.
In the end what kills is not agony (for agony at least asks something of the soul) but everyday life.
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.
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.
Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
Every relation challenges; every relation asks me to be something, do something, respond. Close off response and what is left? Bearing...enduring...waiting.
For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?
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.
If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.
Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.
It is never a waste of time to be outdoors, and never a waste of time to rest, even for a few hours.
The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
