Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.

In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

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.

There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.

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.