“I don’t think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.”

Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”

They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.

Conflict is the soul of literature.

You can’t be creative and still be a good girl.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I’m thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho.

It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

I don’t know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else’s erotica that you don’t like.

Don’t ye know that ev’ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.

If I jump out of bed without hugging my husband, that creates stress between us.

People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of an extreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.

A life of intimacy with God is characterized by joy.

Welcome to the heart of me, the purest, uncut parts of me. These inmost fragments that you see, from pain and passion came to be, in blemished, unclothed intimacy, existing here as poetry.

Emptiness is only a disguise for an intimacy of God’s, that God’s silence, the eerie stillness, is filled by the Word without words, by Him who is above all names, by Him who is all in all. And his silence is telling us that He is here.

My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.

It is a joy to Jesus when a person takes time to walk more intimately with Him. The bearing of fruit is always shown in scripture to be a visible result of an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.

Every time you get on your knees and pray to God, ‘Holy’ keeps the respect and reverence while ‘Father’ brings Him close & intimate.