May Sarton 

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.

Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable.

Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Where music thundered let the mind be still,
Where the will triumphed let there be no will,
What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.