Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.

I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.

If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.

“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”

Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.