People "died" all the time. . . . Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out. . . you always knew when you made a decision against life. The door clicked and you were safe inside-safe and dead.

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.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.

Woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.

It is terribly amusing how many different climates of feelings one can go through in one day.

The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.

It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.