The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

I sometimes think that perhaps our minds are too weak to grasp joy or sorrow except in small things...In the big things joy and sorrow are just alike - overwhelming. At least, we only get them bit by bit, in tiny flashes - in waves - that our minds can't stand for very long. p 199

It is the striving after perfection that makes one an artist. It is the sense that one is imperfect, unfulfilled, unfinished. One attempts by a superhuman effort to fill the gap, to leap over it, to finish it in another medium. And one creates a third and separate thing: 'Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China. But he discovered America.

Go for a short walk in a soft rain - lovely - so many wild flowers startling me through the woods and a lawn sprinkled with dandelions, like a night with stars. And through it all the sound of soft rain like the sound of innumerable earthworms stirring in the ground.

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.

Geniuses were like storms or cyclones, pulling everything into their path, sticks and stones and dust.

The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.