The ball of rumor and criticism, once it starts rolling, is difficult to stop.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant-and therefore beautiful. A tree has significance if one sees it against the empty face of sky. A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side. A candle flowers in the space of night. Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed in space, like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting, the rest of the page bare.

I think one must do the thing -- whatever it is (and it changes from time to time) -- that unites you to the flowing stream of the world. At any price, one must do it first. Otherwise one can do nothing, nothing at all. One is out of touch, out of grace.

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.

Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves; that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.