I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I’m alone in the world and I’m just sort of abandoned.
One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.
The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.
I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.
I wish that I could love someone so much that I would die from it.
Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?
The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.
That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him.
Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.
Like father like son, like mother like daughter!
The Holocaust happened in Europe, and that’s important to how it is viewed. Had Europeans done such a thing in the far corners of the earth, rather than on their own doorstep, it might not be mentioned in the history books.
I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence.
I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can’t do that. I am always writing-but in my head.
I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.
I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don’t like tidying up the garden afterwards.
He must have smiled at me, though I don’t really know, but I don’t like to think that I would love someone who hadn’t first smiled at me.
It’s not that I’m a very good person. It’s that I think I should at least look at the ways in which I am not a good person, the ways in which I so readily become the person who would not notice that the wonderful clothing I’m wearing someone is probably dying for.
I like to be in my pajamas all day. Sometimes I don’t wash for days because I like to read and sit around. I like to eat in bed.
There’s a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.