When one is a stranger to oneself, then one is estranged from others, too.

I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.

One must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief.

... the most ordinary everyday living is as delicate, as breath-taking, as difficult, takes as terrific physical and mental control and effort, as walking a tightrope.

Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock.

Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt A pain undiagnosable but felt.

Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air.