My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

Women's work is always toward wholeness.

And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.

I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.