Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you.

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bearable, because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confiding moods rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal I am at ease.

It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.

To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and an aspiration toward beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.

We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.