gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.
Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.
I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward
For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.
Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.
A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.
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?
Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?
[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .
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.
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.