My dear, I’m seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren’t told that difficult or painful things won’t happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.
It takes too much energy to be against something unless it’s really important.
It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.
If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love.
It’s hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we’re left with a fistful of ashes.
Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.
The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.
Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general.
We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.
We cannot always cry at the right time and who is to say which time is right?
We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.
It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.
Love can’t be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can’t be proved, any more than anything else important in life can be proved.
It’s not my brain that’s writing the book, it’s these hands of mine.
A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.
You don’t know the meaning of moderation, do you, my darling? A happy medium is something I wonder if you’ll ever learn.
We know you have a great mind and all, Mother, but you don’t have much sense.
In my dreams, I never have an age.
Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour – write, write, write.
To grow up is to find the small part you are playing in the extraordinary drama written by somebody else.