... 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.

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

Woman must be the pioneer in this turning inward for strength. In a sense, she has always been the pioneer.

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

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.

One must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief.

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