“If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. 'Green fingers' are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart.”

“If you want to know how much you love someone, take her or him away forever. Your heart and soul and entire body will tell you. You will acquire an undeniable understanding of the size of that love.”

“Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between "That doesn't make sense" and "I don't understand.”

“We can’t make love out here. It’s freezing!” Maryanne cried.A boyishly beseeching look lit up his eyes. “We would heat up quickly.”“It’s fine for you,” she protested. “You only need one part of your body, and you’ll be sliding that into warmth.”

“It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work -- like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.”

“Death demands your attention. It requires you to think your unthinkable. It insists that you go to your dark places, those places you have so carefully learned to avoid all your life. You are pushed far beyond what you ever imagined to be your limits. You must accept your unacceptable.”

“Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.”