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.

I do not like talking casually to people - it does not interest me - and most of them are unwilling to talk at all seriously.

It was a magic caused by the collision of modern methods and old ones; modern history and ancient; accessibility and isolation. And it was a magic which could only strike spark about that time. A few years earlier, from the point of view of aircraft alone, it would have been impossible to reach these places; a few later, and there will be no such isolation.

My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me.

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

Yesterday I sat in a field of violets for a long time perfectly still, until I really sank into it - into the rhythm of the place, I mean - then when I got up to go home I couldn't walk quickly or evenly because I was still in time with the field.

The nice thing about really intelligent people is that when you talk with them they make you feel intelligent too.