The best marriages, like the best lives, were both happy and unhappy. There was even a kind of necessary tension, a certain tautness between the partners that gave the marriage strength, like the tautness of a full sail. You went forward on it.
I do not like talking casually to people – it does not interest me – and most of them are unwilling to talk at all seriously.
Failures aren’t failures if you learn something from them...
Fame separates you from life.
Fame is a kind of death because it arrests life around the person in the public eye.
Frenchwomen just never look ungroomed, do they?
Geniuses were like storms or cyclones, pulling everything into their path, sticks and stones and dust.
The nicest gifts are those left, nameless and quiet, unburdened with love, or vanity, or the desire for attention.
The ball of rumor and criticism, once it starts rolling, is difficult to stop.
I can conceive of ‘falling in love’ over and over again. But ‘marriage,’ this richness of life itself, I cannot conceive of having again – or with anyone else. In this sense ‘marriage’ seems to me indissoluble.
It’s funny how you can be mad at someone one moment and want to hug them the next.
I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.
Can one make the future a substitute for the present? And what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present?
Everything today has been heavy and brown. Bring me a Unicorn to ride about the town.
This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy – even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.
My Life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds.
One can get just as much exultation in losing oneself in a little thing as in a big thing. It is nice to think how one can be recklessly lost in a daisy.
Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.
The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.
America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.