Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.
I am rooted, but I flow.
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.