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

... once you get beyond the crust of the first pang it is all the same and you can easily bear it. It is just the transition from painlessness to pain that is so terrible.

Flowers always have it - poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection . . .

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other.

For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life.

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

Fame is a kind of death because it arrests life around the person in the public eye.