To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.
Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.
Yes, my mother’s death is a terrible sorrow to me. I feel – do you know what I mean – the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known.
That is the fearful part of having been near death. One knows how easy it is to die. The barriers that are up for everybody else are down for you, and you’ve only to slip through.
Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn’t happiness last for ever? For ever wasn’t a bit too long.
The late evening is the time of times. Then with that unearthly beauty before one it is not hard to realise how far one has to go. To write something that will be worthy of that rising moon, that pale light.
Wind moving through grass so that the grass quivers. This moves me with an emotion I don’t even understand.
To long for everything: sorrow; to accept everything: joy.
Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.
I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.
The whole world shall be ours because of our love.
The ostrich burying its head in the sand does at any rate wish to convey the impression that its head is the most important part of it.
It is strange that there are times when I feel the stars are not at all solemn: they are secretly gay.
In the woods where snow is thick, bars of sunlight lay like pale fire.
September is different from all other months. It is more magical. I feel the strange chemical change in the earth which produces mushrooms is the cause, too, of the extra ‘life’ in the air – a resilience, a sparkle.
But the more poetry one reads the more one longs to read!
I don’t believe other people are ever as foolishly excited as I am while I’m working. How could they be? Writers would have to live in trees.
Why! Why! Why is the middle-class so stodgy – so utterly without a sense of humor?
That’s all life is – something childish and very natural. Isn’t it?
Letters are the real curse of my existence. I hate to write them: I have to. If I don’t, there they are – the great guilty gates barring my way.