one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without.

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.

... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.