To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.
My love for you tonight is so deep and tender that it seems to be outside myself as well.
You might drop your heart into me and you’d never hear it touch bottom.
To work – to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do.
When we begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them.
What do you want most to do? That’s what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.
Tidied all my papers. Tore up and ruthlessly destroyed much. This is always a great satisfaction.
I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.
Every time one leaves anywhere, something precious, which ought not to be killed, is left to die.
There are in life as many aspects as attitudes towards it, and aspects change with attitudes.
But one day we shall be rich, and the next poor. One day we shall dine in a palace and the next we’ll sit in a forest and toast mushrooms on a hatpin...
As in the physical world, so in the spiritual world, pain does not last forever.
Whatever happens I have had these blissful, perfect moments and they are worth living for.
Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening – where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.
Oh, impossible. Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder. All the same, two minutes later Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream.
I must say, I hate money. But it’s the lack of it I hate most.
Warm, eager, living life-to be rooted in life-to learn, to desire, to know, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.
Short stories can be like photographs, catching people at some moment in their lives and trapping the memory for ever. There they are, smiling or frowning, looking sad, happy, serious, surprised... And behind those smiles and those frowns lie all the experience of life, the fears and delights, the hopes and the dreams.
Sleeping was her latest discovery. ‘It’s so wonderful. One simply shuts one’s eyes, that’s all. It’s so delicious.
Everything about her was sweet, pale like honey. You would not have been surprised to see a bee caught in the tangles of that yellow hair.