My father taught me that a bill is like a crying baby and has to be attended to at once.

Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.

...the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom. The only real security is... living in the present and accepting it as it is now.

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

Fame is a kind of death because it arrests life around the person in the public eye. If one is recognized everywhere, one begins to feel like Medusa. People stop their normal life and actions and freeze into staring manikins. "We can never catch people or life unawares," as I wrote to my mother, in an outburst of frustration. "It is always looking at us."

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

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