I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work. The curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.

there is no aristocracy of grief. Grief is a great leveler.

How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.

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.

Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock.

You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.