Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection.

The nature of happiness is such that happiness retreats the more intensely you pursue it.

To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out.

There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.

The love that dare not speak its name has become the love that won't shut up.

Women say . . . that if men had to have babies there would soon be no babies in the world. . . . I have sometimes wished that some clever man would actually have a baby in some new labor-saving way; then all men could take it up, and one of the oldest taunts in the world would be stilled forever.

The division between art and deviousness and crime is sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper.