I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.

The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.

People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

But I never cleaned thoroughly enough, my reorganization proved to be haphazard, the disgraces came unfailingly to light, and it was clear how we failed, how disastrously we fell short of that ideal of order and cleanliness, household decency which I as much as anybody else believed in.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?