Too many people, too many demands, too much to do; competent, busy, hurrying people - It just isn't living at all.

What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

Only when a tree has fallen can you take the measure of it. It is the same with a man.

Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality of people more keenly through a letter than face to face?

... not only is life put in new patterns from the air, but it is somehow arrested, frozen into form. (The leaping hare is caught in a marble panel.) A glaze is put over life. There is no flaw, no crack in the surface; a still reservoir, no ripple on its face. Looking down from the air that morning, I felt that stillness rested like a light over the earth. The waterfalls seemed frozen solid; the tops of the trees were still; the river hardly stirred, a serpent gently moving under its shimmering skin.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.