Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet & dancing slippers had slipped away & there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies & turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage except the indestructible red earth on which she stood.

I have a passionate desire for personal privacy. I want to stand before the world, for good or bad, on the book I wrote, not on what I say in letters to friends, not on my husband and my home life, the way I dress, my likes and dislikes, et cetera. My book belongs to anyone who has the price, but nothing of me belongs to the public.

It's a curse - this not wanting to look on naked realities. Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy.

The usual masculine dissillusionment is discovering that a woman has a brain

It had been so long since she had seen him and she had lived on memories until they were worn thin.

Ser eyes met his, hers naked with pleading, his remote as mountain lakes under gray skies. She saw in them defeat of her wild dream, her mad desires.

She hasn't your strength. She's never had any strength. She's never had anything but heart.