If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.

Action is character.

Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.

I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed'-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.

She saw him the first day on board, and then her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.

Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.