before I could read, almost a baby, I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book.

...morbidly, attracted him to strangeness, to recklessnesss, even unhappiness.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.

I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.

Everything tender and melancholy - as life is sometimes, just for one moment.

My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don't, streets that are friendly, streets that aren't, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don't, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won't, and so on.