How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — like rags and shreds of your very life.

Letters are the real curse of my existence. I hate to write them: I have to. If I don't, there they are - the great guilty gates barring my way.

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don't mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one's breathing.

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.... This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it's no longer so. I feel happy- deep down. All is well.

What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

It is strange that there are times when I feel the stars are not at all solemn: they are secretly gay.