Warm, eager, living life-to be rooted in life-to learn, to desire, to know, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.

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.

No, no the mind I love must still have wild places - a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown litde wood, the chance of a snake or two (real snakes), a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with those litde flowers planted by the wind.

I have such a horror of telegrams that ask me how I am!! I always want to reply dead.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?

Do you remember your childhood? I am always coming across these marvelous accounts by writers who declare that they remember 'everything.' I certainly don't. The dark stretches, the blanks, are much bigger than the bright glimpses. I seem to have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard.

Life never become a habit to me. It's always a marvel.