Don’t talk to me any more about poetry for months – unless it is other men’s work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I’m fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.
Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.
Be careful, then, and be gentle about death. For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through the door, even when it opens.
I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don’t know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy.
Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.
For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.
In my very own self, I am part of my family.
One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.
While we live, let us live.
Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?
I do esteem individual liberty above everything.
If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.
She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.
When along the pavement, Palpitating flames of life, People flicker around me, I forget my bereavement, The gap in the great constellation, The place where a star used to be.
Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.
The difference between people isn’t in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people – life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.
Nobody knows you. You don’t know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?
There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.
And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.
They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.
That’s just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what’s good for a man, and she’s going to see he gets it; and no matter if he’s starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she’s got him, and is giving him what’s good for him.