She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn’t listen, at sitting in other people’s lives just for a minute while they talked round her.
What I feel for you can’t be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise – it beats words. It beats worlds. I promise.
You have never been curious about me; you never wanted to explore my soul.
Outside the sky is light with stars.
To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.
My love for you tonight is so deep and tender that it seems to be outside myself as well.
You might drop your heart into me and you’d never hear it touch bottom.
To work – to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do.
When we begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them.
What do you want most to do? That’s what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.
Tidied all my papers. Tore up and ruthlessly destroyed much. This is always a great satisfaction.
I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.
Every time one leaves anywhere, something precious, which ought not to be killed, is left to die.
There are in life as many aspects as attitudes towards it, and aspects change with attitudes.
But one day we shall be rich, and the next poor. One day we shall dine in a palace and the next we’ll sit in a forest and toast mushrooms on a hatpin...
As in the physical world, so in the spiritual world, pain does not last forever.
Whatever happens I have had these blissful, perfect moments and they are worth living for.
Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening – where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.
Oh, impossible. Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder. All the same, two minutes later Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream.
I must say, I hate money. But it’s the lack of it I hate most.
Warm, eager, living life-to be rooted in life-to learn, to desire, to know, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.