God may want you to be the answer to your own prayer.

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

The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.

My diaries were written primarily, I think, not to preserve the experience but to savor it, to make it even more real, more visible and palpable, than in actual life. For in our family an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down or shared with another.

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.

Can you write a book and have children at the same time? Yes, if you're content to do it very very slowly.

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.