In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less." "Unless you love them.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.

The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at-loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.