More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

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

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.