I am writing this during my lunch period, because I need to reach towards the outside world of sanity, because I am overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the clerical work still to be done, and because at this hour of the morning normal ladies are still sleeping.

... good teachers, like Tolstoy's happy families, are alike everywhere.

I’ll never retire as long as I live—that’s like retiring from life! I’ll never stop writing, teaching, lecturing. If you’re in good health, living is exciting on its own.

People ate bread made of the shells of peas because there was no flour.

But if there is such a thing as social commitment in literature, I think it must manifest itself in a reader's awareness of the human condition, in the writer's touching some common nerve ending. I think this kind of social commitment, like a lady's slip, should be there but it must not show.

I so enjoy being old because for the first time I don't have to do anything-work, teach, study. I feel very good about myself-and at my age I can say no to anything now if I don't want to do it. What a liberating word.

And that's it; that's why I want to teach; that's the one and only compensation: to make a permanent difference in the life of a child.