The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.