“So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold on its swarming phenomena; so long as there is more to be discovered and made, more to grasp for and make real, we must go on inventing ourselves.”

“So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us.”

“What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.”

“... history is forever unfinished, forever in process; endless because our needs are endless.”

“I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that which drives us on to what we must finally become… This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis.”

“We are free at last to believe in ourselves.”

“Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.”