Reading keeps you from going ga-ga.
Humour is the best way to make the unbearable bearable.
Those times, I tried to think of something happy, something I’d liked – but not something I loved, for that made it worse.
I don’t know whether to feel flattered or hunted.
I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art – be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music – enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.
When I got up this morning the sea was full of sun pennies – and now it all seems to be covered in lemon scrim. Writers ought to live far inland or next to the city dump, if they are ever to get any work one. Or perhaps they need to be stronger-minded than I am.
Women like poetry. A soft word in their ears and they melt – a grease spot on the grass.
Light griefs are loquacious, but the great are dumb.
People don’t know how chickens can turn on you, but they can – just like mad dogs.
His writings have made me his friend.
This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.
Do you suppose the St. Swithin’s furnace-man was my one true love? Since I never spoke to him, it seems unlikely, but at least it was a passion unscathed by disappointment.
The first rule of snooping is to come at it sideways.
Friends, show me a man who hates himself, and I’ll show you a man who hates his neighbors more! He’d have to – you’d not grant anyone else something you can’t have for yourself – no love, no kindness, no respect!
Isola doesn’t approve of small talk and believes in breaking the ice by stomping on it.
Have you ever noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that person’s name suddenly pops up everywhere you go? My friend Sophie calls it coincidence, and Mr. Simpless, my parson friend, calls it Grace. He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world, and “fruitfulness” is drawn in.
Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done, to have advanced true friends?” It isn’t. I hope, wherever she is, she has that in her mind.
If there is Predestination, then God is the devil.
I have seized the day, and the night too.
I told him that if one had to ask which, it generally meant neither.