In the woods where snow is thick, bars of sunlight lay like pale fire.

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

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.

There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.

Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it.

We can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough. But the tremendous effort needed- one doesn't always want to make it-does one? ... But what else can be done? What's the alternative? What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.

Outside the sky is light with stars