The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's stimulating loneliness.

After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.

The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.

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

In general, I feel, or I have come to feel, that the richest writing comes not from the people who dedicate themselves to writing alone. I know this is contradicted again and again but I continue to feel it. They don't, of course, write as much, or as fast, but I think it is riper and more satisfying when it does come. One of the difficulties of writing or doing any kind of creative work in America seems to me to be that we put such stress on production and material results. We put a time pressure and a mass pressure on creative work which are meaningless and infantile in that field.

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

The nicest gifts are those left, nameless and quiet, unburdened with love, or vanity, or the desire for attention.