For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.

There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .

Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

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.