Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and - if it does not create it - maintains decency.

My kitchen linoleum is so black and shiny that I waltz while I wait for the kettle to boil. This pleasure is for the old who live alone.

Life does not acommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

Making those we love happy sounds innocent as a dove, but it can be as destructive as a lion.

Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.

life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.

Difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.

I wonder if living alone makes one more alive. No precious energy goes in disagreement or compromise. No need to augment others, there is just yourself, just truth - a morsel - and you.

Is life a pregnancy? That would make death a birth.

Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its fight channel.

When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.

You never really know something until you teach it to someone else.

I am the Mud Hut I Grew Upon

To marry is to surrender everything--not only your body but your pride, your independence, even your life.

We falsely interpret the world around us. We ignore evidence that doesn't support our prior beliefs and we convince ourselves we know things we don. We think we know things we don't know.

I was going to come in and push you down the stairs.

You've got to dance like nobody's watching, and love like it's never going to hurt.

Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.

loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To everything on earth the compass round

I'm into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.